I have been training quite hard over the last few months as I started kick boxing four months ago. My instructor asked me if I would be interested in competing and I said I would give it a go. Here is a video from my exploits on Saturday. I managed to scoop the bronze medal but I was more thankful of just winning a few fights as I had expected to lose badly. The people I were fighting against were all higher belts than me – so all in all I was quite happy with my weekend’s work. I am now planning on getting better and trying to improve on this at the next Interclub Kickboxing tournament ...

I have read some interesting research taken from Upstream’s 2012 Digital Advertising Attitudes Report on the fact that more than a quarter of British Facebook users will ditch the social network if they are subjected to more intrusive advertising. OK, so there is the main PR headline that they were looking for. In my view people say they will leave the social network but you and I both know that isn’t true. They will complain, they will rant and rave but then they will continue logging in to see what their friends are getting up too. The news release states: Nearly two thirds (66 per cent each) of British and American online consumers ...

I have just found this video on the Digital Buzz blog posted by Katy Daniells and I have to say it’s brilliant. I love a good stunt type video and this take on flash mobbing to demonstrate the product is superb. The concept is get a lot of people together and sit them next to each other and get them to make one huge picture out of around 60 digital screens. The guys sit next to a basket ball court in the US somewhere and create an interactive crowd for a few people – total genius. A nice stunt that works great on video.

I stumbled across this little application earlier in the week, it’s called the Top 5 News and it’s an experiment from two Guardian journalists. The premise is that they gather the top five stories from the major news sources in the UK. It’s only in beta at the moment but I can see the appeal of it as you get a feel for each title immediately which did amuse me somewhat. Cheryl ...

I have just logged into my Facebook pages today and noticed something rather interesting. Facebook seems to have rolled out a new feature that allows you to invite your Facebook friends to your Facebook page. This takes me back a few years when they used to do that with Facebook groups but I beleive they removed it due to the amount of spamming that was happening because of the feature. The inability to invite people to pages is one of the reasons there are so ...

This week I have been doing quite a bit of analysis and research into bloggers and online influencers. This has become part of my day job reading, researching and engaging and I am often asked by other PR professionals to give recommendations on some of the tools that I use. So I thought a quick post on a few might help. To make this test fair I have used a local theme park that my family and I like to visit called Flamingo Land as I thought it would be a bit more fun that the usual corporate stuff. 1. Searchmetrics Essentials Now today I received an approach (from a friend of mine) for this blog to cover an SEO website ...

I was listening to the Today programme this morning with James Naughtie presenting and he was interviewing the chief executive of RBS Stephen Hester. No sooner did we get into the interview and Mr Hester was asked if his salary wasn’t enough. This really irritated me – I am sick of this media witch hunt against this guy that is trying to do his job. Let’s get something straight – he wasn’t a banker before the banking crisis of 2008 which meant he wasn’t involved in any of the mistakes of the previous regime. He was taken on board to remove the entire RBS board and start again building the bank’s balance sheet ...

This is a guest post written by good friend and colleague Zubair, you can follow him on Twitter @souljaof4tune and read his blog here. After a rather interesting discussion with Chris about some really good PR and social media blogs out there and the realisation that no one has a made a list of the very best (we all love a good list – don’t we?) in a long time. I decided to create this, the top 25 UK PR and social media blogs. Using the Ad Age Power 150, a list of the top English language marketing blogs. I pulled together all the UK PR and social media blogs I could find and decided to see what they ...

I love this short clip, in it Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy hit back at Fox News during a press conference here in the UK following the London Premiere of their new film. You can’t tell me you haven’t seen the publicity for it as these two have been doing the rounds on every TV and radio show going. Fox News had publically criticized the film for supposedly pushing a 'dangerous liberal agenda' at kids. Which in my view is ridiculous. I love the fact that the Muppets hold press conferences – we should get these guys back on TV every week because they are brilliant.

Facebook has today announced its new edit feature which allows users and page administrators to edit their statuses after they have been posted. According to the latest research 94% of all Facebook users have actually deleted posts due to typos and poor mistakes in Facebook updates because there was previously no edit function. The recent launch of Google+ has forced the more established social network to raise its game by releasing a whole new set of features. I bet you have been reading ...