The last month in web marketing terms has been very interesting indeed, many PR people don’t often worry themselves with what Google is up to, in terms of its updates, and to be honest 90% of the time they don’t need to. However, the latest update to Google has caused a rather large disturbance in the force for companies that specialise in search engine optimisation or SEO to you and me. Google Penguin was updated on April 24th 2012 and what it has changed is quite significant. It’s not long since we heard about Google Panda getting rid of “black hat” SEO practices ...

Today I came across a clever new twitter application that offers people the chance to donate the remaining characters from their tweets in order to raise awareness of the charity Help for Heroes. It is all part of a wider campaign called http://www.hashtags4heroes.com/. The campaign has been created for the whole month of May (which in PR terms is Military Appreciation Month) to raise awareness for Wounded Warrior Project (WWP) and injured service members. Every time a user tweets during the time period, the application will autofill any unused Twitter characters with messages that help  spread the word about their charitable ...

Last week I joined a panel debate at the University of York for its Careers Service in front of several hundred students to discuss jobs in the creative sector. It was a fascinating debate with people from across the country spanning several different specialisms. There were representatives from consumer insight , advertising, PR and social media marketing companies. There were people from Ogilvy, The Labour Party and Aviva and it made for an interesting discussion. I went with my Dinosaur PR hat on to explain what students can do for jobs in this sector and in this region. I think we all now acknowledge that this is one of the most protracted nasty recessions we have ...

This week we have just been putting the finishing touches to this new Facebook application called The Messy Garden which we have had built for a client. The client has issued some academic research on sustainable gardens and the benefits of having a messy section in your garden to attract bees and other insects. The brief for this campaign was to make sustainable gardening more accessible and to reach out to a new demographic that doesn’t normally think about gardening. The team are doing a great job on the usual traditional media relations campaign which includes us showcasing ...

We attended the Yorkshire Business Market yesterday and it was interesting to take a new view on how things in the business and marketing world are changing and have evolved over the last six years. When I started blogging, many years and moons ago, there weren’t many people talking about social media apart from the geeks and bloggers of course. In fact, when my team and I used to pitch way back in 2008 for as we called it then “Word of Mouth Marketing ...

I stumbled across a post by Richard Leigh about a PR stunt for a TV channel in Belgium yesterday. I thought it was pretty clever and I found myself watching the video to the end - which is very rare for me - because all of the way through I was thinking I am not sure we would be able to do that in the UK. Have a look at the video below and see what you think. Do you think we could have go it signed off over here? It’s a brilliant execution with a very high risk strategy but as a viral video its genius. I could just see the red tape and risk assessments ...

So this week has been interesting in the world of politics and I am not even talking about the famous Pie Tax. No this week the Government recommended that we all get a jerry can and fill it up at the fuel pumps because of a looming Fuel Tanker drivers strike. This is a strike that has not been confirmed yet and there is no date for. So what does the majority of the UK population do? Exactly, what David and his boys tell us. We start panic buying petrol and queuing up and causing havoc on the roads. We really are a country of geniuses aren’t we? Sometimes I tend to think we are just sheep that will listen ...

Warning this post is not about social media, online PR or internet marketing. It is just a quick link to the DJ set I performed and recorded live at a nightclub called Moko Lounge in Harrogate on Friday night. The music I play is everything from funky house through to the more funky electro. I do like a nice strong base line and a strong vocal. For this set I played for 3.5hrs and this is about an hour in so it is a bit more up tempo rather than a warm up set. I was asked to ...

The PR stunt of the week, so far OK so it’s only Monday, has to go to Alton Towers. The reason is the team there have managed to get national coverage on the fact the new ride “Nemesis Sub-Terra” ride has been classed for the over 12s by the British Board of Film and Classification. As soon as I read that I thought – genius move. This was obviously carefully thought through to make it sound very, very scary and even the board admitted they had never classified a ride before. So that get’s a big tick from me as that story has made both the Sun and Metro. Then I spotted this viral ...

This week has been a tad hectic because I have been away until today on paternity leave following the birth of my second child Harvey. However, before I went away I had spent a number of weeks with my team preparing a social media campaign for my brilliant client Monster Pet Supplies to help increase engagement and improve relationships with key pet influencers and improve awareness of the brand in social media. Following some extensive online research and analysis of conversations taking place online around pets together we devised a strategy of creating a place where all of the pet sites could ...