This is the first guest post I have had on my blog and it’s from Nick Hill, a director at Binary Vision. I have known Nick for a while now and seen him speak several times, his knowledge and expertise in behaviour and interpersonal skills are extremely impressive and I thought it would be interesting to hear his take on client management in the PR industry. He works with quite a few marketing and public relations firms and the feedback I have heard from his clients has been astounding as he really knows his stuff. Nick uses the latest psychology tools to transform team members into high performers that in turn create more business. His programmes focus ...

This is quite a timely post really, you may have noticed I haven’t been quite as active as I normally am recently, well that is because I have been busy working on several exciting online projects and I thought it was about time I shared one of them with you. During the last couple of months I have been providing some strategic consultancy to an exciting new internet venture which caught my eye a while ago. TheFashionPixie.com aims to reduce the amount of time, hassle and emails that people ...

I have been talking about Twitter quite a bit recently on a number of blogs that I have the pleasure to write on. I don’t share everything on my own blog but I think this tool is worth sharing if you like using free tools for monitoring purposes. Tweet Cloud is a well produced free tool which lets you see a topic cloud of the most used words on Twitter around one particular term or phrase. As a vanity exercise I tested it out on my own name and you can see the results ...

I meet lots of entrepreneurs and business leaders who are all interested in using Twitter and the other social channels to grow their business and communicate their marketing messages. I tell them that Twitter is about relationships, and growing those relationships, which in-turn should help grow their business. I have made quite a few real-life friends and contacts through Twitter and often the relationships started online and then one of us picked up the phone, or Skyped each other, or simply had a good old fashioned meet up. Twitter has without doubt become the golden boy ...

If like most PR practitioners you are mildly interested in measuring ROI for a social media campaign. I would recommend you have a read of this presentation from Oliver Blanchard, in case you didn’t know, he is the principal at BrandBuilder Marketing in the US. In the presentation he looks at the various questions being asked by clients and agencies about measuring ROI for social media campaigns. I have recommended this as I particularly liked the tongue-in-cheek manner in which he has written it and the amusing speech bubbles he uses to get his point across. He examines the elements which are easily measurable and then he scrutinises the other things a client ...

Revolution magazine reported an interesting story this week that my beloved Liverpool FC is now officially the first English Premier League team to have reached the 1 million fan mark with its Liverpool FC Facebook page. Those of you that know me well, will know that I am a huge fan of the club and now also its Facebook page. The club has used Facebook brilliantly (since May) by engaging in conversation (each post receiving around 900 comments), giving behind the scenes interviews and ...

A report by Lightspeed Research revealed this week that consumers in the UK won’t pay for their online news content. We have all heard about Rupert Murdoch’s plan to move to a paid for content business model. Personally, I think this is a very risky strategy but the newspapers certainly have to do something to combat their dwindling circulation figures. I definitely think it is time for the newspaper industry to start evolving and looking for potential revenue streams. However, I don’t think this is the answer and I still think that paid for content simply won’t work on news across the board. That said, I can see people paying for a really ...

I have been on holiday for a couple of weeks and whilst I was away sunning myself and trying to stop my little boy from diving in the deep end of the hotel pool, I read a couple of books which I would like to share with you in case you were looking for something to read. The first book I read was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaksi. This book is an easy to read life story about somebody who grew up with a real dad who is a teacher (poor dad – although not ...

It is no surprise to any of us that the housing market, although picking up a bit in recent months, is still suffering from the dreaded R word. Many first time buyers have been struggling to get mortgages from banks and even long term property owners are finding it costly to sell. Well things might be on the up as some clever little chaps (which I met recently) have come up with a new concept on private property sales and buying or renting for that matter. Bethemiddleman.com does exactly what it says ...

The most exciting DJ product to enter the world of DJing in the last ten years was arguably the Pioneer CDJ 1000, well now Pioneer has launched its younger brother with more bells and whistles than ever. These new turntables have a mind blowing array of features and software. I had two CDJ 1000 MK 2’s and I have played extensively on the MK 3s, so I can’t wait to get my hands on these. Duncan one of my good friends over on the Rising Music blog comments: “With one these decks coming in at roughly the price of two mk3's (£1,499 each!) I think Pioneer is going to have a ...