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 were all about. The Power 150 list is created through user submissions. I found a lot of the UK blogs on the list seem to be from agencies who’ve submitted there blog and didn’t really offer much of an insight into the industry. This leads me to add that this isn’t a ‘best of’ list but rather a collection of blogs that could one day prove to be rather helpful.

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I have been working in online PR for a number of years now and I have definitely noticed that a lot more marketers accept that blogging does have major SEO benefits. Halleluiah – our work is now done then and we can all relax. Hang on a minute…

In this post I am not going to bang on about writing online content just for Google because I covered that last week here. What I mean is blogging and social media campaigns are about creating interesting content that helps create conversations with your core audience no matter who that is. This doesn’t mean it has to be boring keyword packed copy that just ticks the SEO box. It should be the more interesting stuff that helps bring the company to life rather than the duller run of the mill stuff.

For instance, does the CEO of your company or client have a hobby like running, swimming or better yet fencing? If so why not start covering his marathons and add a charity element on the blog and you have got something interesting to talk about that makes your client seem slightly more interesting that the competition. A blog should act like the window into the business – it should bring it to life beautifully and shouldn’t be a chore. It is not your corporate brochure – don’t let the senior team suck your creativity away.

Even if you do have well written content, and you have created a designated conversation calendar for the next three months, you should still be asking yourself a few quick questions.

Here are my fifteen questions to ask yourself:

1. Do you have a content calendar/plan?
2. Have you properly syndicated your corporate blog?
3. Is it plugged into all of your social channels using a service like Twitterfeed? Are their share buttons on each post?
4. Does it have different categories? Do you make sure you use them properly on each post? (Don’t use uncategorised)
5. Does your blog actually allow comments? (I have seen a lot that don’t and that is bad practice)
6. Is your feed managed and optimised through Feedburner?
7. Does it have a search facility? Or an archives section so people can quickly find your content?
8. Does it have an about page?
9. Does it name the writers and explain who they are?
10. Is it easy to subscribe? By email for instance.
11. Have you actually identified the influencers in the blogosphere and have you commented on their sites?
12. Have you optimised your content for SEO? Do you use the All in one SEO Plugin for instance.
13. Do you share your articles on article sites such as Ezine articles?
14. Do you actually track all of your content using an analytics package? What is your favourite post for instance?
15. Have you added the blog onto other materials business cards, brochures and news releases?

Here’s a useful post from Kris de Leon on Social Media Today, in it he covers how to increase comments to your blogs and he makes some good points including this one:

Take the time to read other blogs that are related to your niche. This will give you a better understanding of what’s going on in your niche, and better enable you to provide more value to your audience. If you happen to read an amazing article or blog post, leave a quality comment with your thoughts, and if the blogger allows it, indicate a link back to your blog.  Other people who read that blog will take notice of your comment, and be encouraged to check out your own blog and post their own comments.

This is my point, you should be spending as much time commenting on other blogs (if not more) than writing your own content. A comment becomes a link back to your blog and then more people can find you. I mean ask yourselves how did you find this post?

Here are Kris’ top 5 tips for getting more comments

• Tip #1: Make sure it’s easy for the reader to comment
• Tip #2: Ask Questions
• Tip #3: Respond to people who comment
• Tip #4: Comment on other blogs
• Tip #5: Invite a bit of controversy

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I mean even if the infamous spiders did actually find your blog post, a real user is just going to land on your dull post and think – what the hell is this rubbish? And then go somewhere else anyway therefore negating the entire process you have spent ages on. I know that keywords and your rankings matter to you and your client but let’s write content that is interesting and has your keywords in it too. Surely that is the best of both worlds. Even if it does work today – it isn’t going to work in a few months take it from me.

I feel better after that.

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Thanks

1. Shirl’s Garden Watch – Packed full of pictures, videos and information, Shril’s Garden Watch is a great website that is constantly updated. With the photos she’s taken you can follow her trips through garden’s that she has visited complete with plant identifications.

2. The Galloping Gardener – Constantly travelling, the Galloping Gardener provides many great pictures and insights of many of the gardens that they have visited in the UK and abroad. They also provide tips for the best gardens to visit at different times of the year or for certain types of plants as well as recommendations for garden hotels.

3. Joanne’s Cottage Garden – Joanne shows you around her garden at different stages of the year with high quality pictures as well as around gardens and shows that she has visited.

4. The Smallest Smallholding – Follows a vegetarian who has rescued four ex-battery hens and developed a vegetable plot to become more self-sustaining.

5. The Compost Bin – A diary following the life of a gardener who produces organic fruit and vegetables as well as wine and cider as well as looking after a number of animals. She is also an Environmental Educator who teaches both adults and children about organic gardening and crafts.

6. Horticultural – A gardener and journalist, Jane takes us through the transformation of her garden. She gives tips regarding a number of different plants and how they can be used around the home and garden as well as recommendations for reading for foragers.

7. Emma Cooper – Keeping us up-to-date with her gardening, Emma provides information for growing vegetables as well as planting. She uses the articles to answer the questions of readers and from other blogs as part of her ‘Blog Challenge.’

8. Crocus – Discusses a number of plants and the time to start growing them as well as growing fruit and vegetables. Sally Nex also provides her top ten favourite vegetable gardens.

9. Guerrilla Gardening – A project set up in 2004 to develop unused plots across London for growing plants and fruit and vegetables. Like-minded projects have spread to a much wider level now, including activities in Rome, Warsaw and New York.

10. My Tiny Plot – About a former senior editor at a magazine who now looks after a plot in Bath with her family. She writes about seasonal cooking and vegetable gardening and has also written a gardening book for children.

11. Veg Plotting –  This blog is all about the maintenance of a woman’s (The lovely Michelle) allotment as well as providing recipes, book recommendations and wildlife. This one is well worth a read.

12. Down on the Allotment – A plot owner and dog behaviourist who documents her plants and vegetables through photos as well as a number of shows that she visits.

13. The Enduring Gardener – Written by Stephanie Donaldson, contributing gardens editor of Country Living, The Enduring Gardener covers a wide range of topics including compost, recipes and distinctive plants.

14. Fennel and Fern – Written by a gardening collective, topics range from conditions for growing plants to lesser known types of fruit and vegetables. They also welcome submissions for articles as well as pictures.

15. An Artist’s Garden – A diary of a textile artist’s garden with regular posts to show the development of the garden. There are also visits to other gardens and high quality photographs of individual plants.

16. Ryan’s Garden – Owner of chickens, a small suburban garden and an allotment, Ryan started writing after a car accident left him unable to carry out any gardening. He gives instructions on how to create a number of well presented flower decorations and gifts as well as ornaments for around the garden.

17. The Inelegant Gardener – Full of photos from trips to flower shows and some unusual vegetables, the Inelegant Gardener provides a mix for flora and poetry. There is also a collection of home-grown vegetables and flowers.

18. Gardeners’ World – Written by the experts from Gardeners’ World magazine the articles cover a number of different topics such as wildlife, plants and allotments. Each gives advice to amateur gardeners to help them develop their skills.

19. London Vegetable Garden – Having had to wait for an allotment, Callum attempted to grow vegetables on his London balcony with varying degrees of success. This diary follows his success and failures in gardening with pictures to illustrate how he has coped, at times, with the lack of space.

20. Helen’s Blog – Describing herself as a late-comer to the gardening world, Helen taught a basic gardening course for adults and continuously developed her skills. Since then she has presented two gardening shows on the BBC as well as writing a book and for various publications.

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Apologies if there is anyone I have missed off but please feel free to share your blog in the comments section if you think it will be of interest. After all, the more the merrier. If we get more added I will review this list and do another one for 2012.

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The latest reports have revealed that numbers are dropping off and people aren’t logging in and with yesterday’s announcement of Facebook which will allow people to filter their friends is Google+ going to drop off a cliff. I don’t know I am not psychic but they have a fight on their hands that’s for sure. Mr Zuckerberg likes to make sure other networks don’t innovate beyond them and beat the mighty book of face – he has learnt a lot from the likes of MySpace and Friendsreunited.

So as part of my daily job, working in digital PR and the social space, is creating online conversation reports and using them to create a clear digital strategy. For those of you that don’t have to get involved with these huge document’s they are basically a lengthy statistics analysis document which closely examine and analyse data surrounding a topic.

When I am creating them my team and I look at a particular topic of interest using a variety of different conversation monitoring tools (they are all pretty similar) to analyse what is being said about that topic or client online. Now if I had a pound for every social media monitoring tool that has contacted me over the last 12 months to go through a web demo I think I could have retired. However, that said there are some really useful tools out there which can be used to look at conversation drivers but the skill isn’t pulling the data out of these tools its then using your experience and knowledge to analyse what opportunities the data shows.

When we look at conversation trends one of the key areas I look at is what do people already share around that topic?, what are their worries?, what is negative?, what is positive? and how can we use this information to give these communities something which will rally help them chat about this online. In other words, how can we help these guys write and talk.

I have noticed a strong theme whilst analysing these reports and that is that social media channels and still being driven predominately by PR news and the more traditional news sources. I remember some research I a while back that said most of the conversation online came from a small amount of news sources and that still seems to be true.

I have just prepared a few slides of analysis on a subject close to my heart London 2012 (not a client – I wish) to show you what I mean. However, this is just a quick flavour, we have done a full report recently and the PowerPoint deck alone had 223 slides so it can be a very big job but well worth it at the end of it all.

As you can see the clear driver of all the spikes in conversation in this small piece of data analysis are from the daily news agenda which is creating peaks but I think the real opportunity here is for the community managers to benefit from focussing future campaigns on the troughs. Yes I mean the hard bit. I read another article in The Metro a couple of weeks back which covered the launch of the new Olympic shopping Mall in East London which has more than 300 shops and which has created hundreds of jobs and changed the local landscape. Again people were sharing this story everywhere but what campaigns can they use to drive buzz when there isn’t a big news announcement? What strategy do they have to keep people talking about the games right up the day of launch?

I talk a lot about online crisis management and you may have thought the ticket shortages may have been a problem for the Olympics. Really? Have a think about it – they created so much hype and demand for the tickets they sold out more than five to one. Is the Olympic Committee going to be upset about that? I strongly doubt it, the idea was to sell out venues in London and create a legacy and they have already sold the venues out with the demand they created. Could they have handled the ticket situation better? Yes, definitely but then we could all manage situations better in hindsight. Personally, I should have gone for more than three sets of tickets myself because I only got one set but hey that’s life.

Many people have bought into the belief that social media is now as powerful as traditional media but although social media is influential and can have a big effect it is still the more traditional news sources that are driving the online conversation and that is a fact.

So I will open this up for discussion do you think most of the buzz online is still created by the traditional media sources?

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I have just got back to work today after seven beautifully sunny days in Kos with my family and after going through the obligatory work related emails I stumbled across a number of tweets congratulating me on my position in the Brand Republic Top Marketing Blogs.  In case you didn’t know the BR 200 is a list of (it’s description):

“The best advertising, marketing, media, PR and digital blogs from around the world, ranked in terms of traffic and social influence.”

I opened the link to find out that my little-old blog is ranked 27th in the world and I was stunned and overwhelmed. Obviously, there are some truly amazing blogs in this list and I am honoured to be even within the first couple of hundred.

So I would like to thank all of you lovely people for reading, commenting and generally helping me to write this stuff. Now all I have to do is keep it up and be interesting.

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#heapsong1 is the working title of the first song from my new album. The album will be completed in roughly 3 years, with a new song released every 3 months as soon as it’s completed.

My fourth solo album begins here, with you on the 14th March. You are the spark of inspiration.

Have a look at the ‘keyboard’ page, hover over the piano keys, click and discover how you can get involved with sounds, words, image and video.

Why am I doing this? Well, there’s so much going on in my life with touring, talks and tech that this was both a necessity coupled with my passion for collaborative, spontaneous and creative projects. I also love the idea of turning the tables in that the seeds of the song begins with you, making a full circle when you experience it as a finished piece.

Plus… I often thrive on a deadline (Speeding Cars + Can’t take it in both written / recorded in a week) and creative limitations (Glittering Cloud – a song about locusts using purely locust samples as the rhythm track!). I want to really put myself to the test and I’m going to have fun doing it, with you!

I wonder where your ‘seeds’ are going to lead me?

Imogen is also a huge advocate of video blogging and she regularly shares her latest ideas and works. She even provides a schedule of when she is going to be doing this through a Ustream channel here is the schedule page in case your interested.

On the microsite the user sees a virtual piano (pictured) here each key is a different day and has its own video explaining that day’s task. The Timeline for ‘#HeapSong1′ is as follows;

• 14th March: The ‘recording’ process will begin with Imogen’s fans uploading sound ‘seeds’ for the song (a cat’s meow, rustling leaves, banging on pots and pans) from all over the world via Soundcloud to her #heapsong1 microsite. Imogen will be online chatting about and choosing those sounds her instincts draw her to.
• 15th March: People can submit words to a ‘wordcloud’ where more popular words visually grow in size. Imogen will be watching and writing at home being inspired by these ‘buzz’ words with an aim to encapsulate that day in time, lyrically.
• 16th March: A space for people to upload their own photographs/ drawings/ stencils etc they feel connect to the past two inspirational ‘seed’ day’s themes in some way. The favourite/s will be incorporated into the 3DiCD (a virtual 3D CD) digital artwork.
• 17th March: Thursday is for moving image (animation/film etc). These will be the core of the video for the song. Again, urging people to choose clips they feel flow with the direction of the song.
• 18th March: Imogen will reveal the middle section of the song only… here she will encourage people to record a ‘solo’ (beatbox, cello, vocal, spoons, you name it) via Soundcloud over this section.
• 19th March: Imogen will discuss and choose one or some of these solos which will be added into the mix.
• 21st March: The song will be written and completed by the morning of the 21st March just in time to make the video which will be filmed, edited and ready for release 28th March.
• 26th March: Imogen, during this period will be inviting/challenging fans to draw inspiration from those same initial seeds and finish a piece of work of their own. On this day they can upload their work for all to see and hear on an ‘inspiration wall’, whether that might be poetry, music or a video
  blog response.
• 28th March: Taking things to the extreme, Imogen will reveal the first listen of the song publicly on her website on 28th March in parallel with a live remix by Tim Exile who will also be hearing it for the first time. http://www.timexile.com

Her fans are encouraged to send anything from car horns through to rustling leaves. All of the content which is sent in and used is to be accredited and paid for appropriately which I think is pretty fair too. I think this is an interesting and exciting concept. It is giving the fans the power to actually influence their favourite musician’s album.

If I am going to be picky I think the channels could have been done a bit slicker and shared a bit better but I still think this is an interesting idea and something which could prove extremely fruitful for both Imogen and her fans. Social media is about engagement and you can’t get much more engaging than producing the music yourself.

I would like to give a bit of a hat tip to my good friend Gemma Wilson who tipped me off about this as she knows the type of stuff I like to blog about.

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The team lost but I have to admit the performance was one of the best from them I have seen this season but that isn’t saying much. The fact that they played with 10 men for the majority of the game did bode well though. However, something that ruined the game was a penalty awarded to Man Utd for questionable contact on Dimitar Berbatov in the second minute. Whether it was a penalty or not is neither here nor there as it is now in the past but the Dutch striker Ryan Babel criticised the referee openly on his Twitter page and then posted a joke picture of the referee Howard Webb dressed in a Manchester Utd shirt.

Following this the Football Association has now decided to prosecute him for this and I think quite rightly too. I have discussed the issue of footballers using social media channels to vent their frustrations before. In fact, in that article I went through my top five social networking mistakes and incredibly one included Ryan Babel back then – so he obviously isn’t a quick leaner. Here they are in case you are interested:

1. Darren Bent allegedly attacks Tottenham’s chairman as his transfer to Sunderland dragged on and is fined £80K.
2. A professional footballer nicknamed “Motor Mouth” reveals he plans to leave his club Crystal Palace for Fulham on his Facebook page but manages to inform the site’s 2.7 million London network members.
3. American Striker Altidore is fined by Hull City FC after revealing why his boss dropped him for the game with Portsmouth FC to all of his followers.
4. Liverpool winger Ryan Babel enrages manager Rafeal Benitez by writing on his Twitter page two days ago: "Hey people, I got some disappointing news, I am not travelling to Stoke. The Boss left me out the squad. No explanation.”
5. Thierry Henry apologises for “Hand Gate” the day after the match with Ireland.

I think the time has now come for either the PFA or the FA to draw up a set of guidelines for players as they don’t seem to understand that posting on social networking channels is going to get them into trouble. They are superstars in their own right and journalists/bloggers monitor these pages closely as soon as you right something contentious it is going to end up in the national papers as they are looking for stories all of the time. This needs to keep up with the rest of the world.

This month will be another interesting one as the transfer window is now open and I expect to see many more players criticising their clubs on social channels as they try to engineer their moves.

Do you think there should be official guidelines for footballers? OR do you believe clubs should just ban their players from doing it like Manchester Utd did a while back?

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Twitter finally became a courtroom tool last week when a court judge allowed mediamen to tweet from a bail hearing for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. However, two days after this ground breaking moment another judge barred it, so it’s clearly still a contentious issue.

I have to admit I am slightly worried what a micro-blogging service like Twitter could do to a live trial and I think they need to treat this area with real caution. I have been a big advocate of Twitter since it started way back in 2006 when there were only a handful of us using it in the UK but even I think a move like this needs to managed very carefully.

I am not a huge fan of the US system that allows cameras into a courtroom as I think it trivialises the cases and create a bit of a media circus around something which is usually extremely serious and often distressing.

One good point to make here is it is only journalists that are allowed to tweet from the courtrooms and this is a positive thing as they have to abide by a professional code of conduct. At least that means that a normal member of the public can’t start sharing their opinions about the case live on social media.

To write a tweet you often need to paraphrase a sentence or paragraph, and in doing that sometimes you can miss key elements of a story. This is usually fine with trivial matters but with court case I fear this could cause problems and lead to some form of misinterpretation. I also wonder if people, namely witnesses or worse still criminals themselves, will be able to follow a trial by logging onto the relevant twitter stream.

There is no doubt Twitter is brilliant for feeding us all with the latest tit bits of information but I think courtrooms are no place for this social network. What do you think – is it a good or bad thing?

You can follow me on Twitter here.

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