Please excuse me if this is a bit of a rant but I felt the need to get it out of my system once and for all. You would have to have been hidden under an extremely large rock this week to miss the story about a twitter user revealing the details of celebrity super injunctions on Twitter. In fact, it even made the 10’o clock news last night and my first thought was why? Various people confirmed on Twitter last week the details of the married footballer – in ...

Happy New year to you all, last night was a bit stranger than normal, not just because my whole family are currently struggling with one of those nasty winter viruses but because we experienced an earthquake sat at home. It was just after 9pm and I was sat up watching something on TV when the whole house began to shake, the cupboards started to make rattling noises. It lasted for a about five seconds and felt like a huge train was driving past right under our house. As soon as we felt it we knew it was a tremor but we weren’t sure far it would have travelled, so I went onto my Facebook account and it was full ...

I have been writing online conversation reports for clients for a number of years now and during that period of time it would be understandable to think that we have seen significant changes in the social channels that are influential in these reports. However, in almost all of the 60+ online conversation reports I have written, blogs are still the most influential sources for brands, whether it is business-to-business or business-to-consumer. It is for this reason that I decided to share some quick tips on how to identify an influential blog. I should add a caveat that I would use all of these tools together to give me a feel for a blog, so I wouldn’t recommend using one ...

UPDATE: This will now be launching around end of April as we have decided to add a few more features following feedback from some Twitter users. A while back I wrote a post about an internet (fashion) community I am involved with (http://www.thefashionpixie.com/) and I said it was just one of several web projects that I was undertaking as well as my usual digital pr and social media consultancy. Well I have been working hard during the last five months on a Twitter application and the wait ...

So we heard late last night the news that we all feared David Beckham isn’t going to make it to the World Cup in South Africa. As a proud England fan who has watched our team stutter and start through various tournaments I have to admit I am not surprised we have our first big absence. We should all be used to it by now. It was the last two big tournaments that taught us all about the famous metatarsal following injuries to Beckham and Wayne Rooney. There is no doubt David Beckham has given his all for England out there on the pitch, he is a great role model for kids and has been ...

My friends down at Rising Digital have just published one of their artists latest videos which is worth a watch. Nastla’s crazy is much more mainstream than the usual dance music Seb and the guys distribute but the video is very interesting. It actually reminds me of a cross between Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Michael Jackson’s Leave me Alone – have a look and see what you think.  

One of our social media clients www.Thebusinessdesk.com which started out as a  regional business-to-business news portal a couple of years ago launched its new site for the Midlands yesterday. This is after the success of its North West version which launched last year and is still continuing to thrive. For me the reason Thebusinessdesk.com has been so successful is because it creates good business content (using quality journalists) and is moving with the times both socially and more traditionally. This got me thinking, even though we all know that newspapers ...

An article in The Economist last week claimed that public relations companies are feeling much better about things and doing far better financially. The article stated: “According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more ...

I read an interesting post yesterday that made me sit up and scratch my head. The article was all about Manchester Utd placing a formal statement on its website which read as follows: “The club wishes to make it clear that no Manchester United players maintain personal profiles on social networking websites. Fans encountering any web pages purporting to be written by United players should treat them with extreme scepticism. Any official news relating to Manchester United or its players will be communicated via ManUtd.com.” Now for me this is an interesting development, we have all ...

If you work in marketing or public relations, the chances are you are now regularly being asked to use social media to spread your client’s messages. I have met lots of marketers and business owners who are surprisingly still trying to figure out how to get the most out of these channels with many trying something small but not measuring the results effectively. In light of that fact, I thought it would be good to share some useful Twitter tools with you – so you can measure that and see how you are doing. The truth is Twitter is all about conversation, not just marketing offers, although that said they do help to a certain point. To ...