I was reading my feeds this morning and came across this little gem from our friend Darren Rowse at Problogger. He has put together a nice infogrpahic on what makes the perfect blogger outreach campaign. I have worked on a lot of blogger outreach campaigns over the last few years and one of the first things I ask the client is what is in it for the blogger and his/her readers not just your marketing campaign? If there isn’t anything in it for both of them and the company then I tell them that it isn’t right for blogger outreach – it’s that simple. I get a lot of PR approaches myself, some good, some bad ...

I posted a while ago about a quiz I was organising to help raise money for a couple of charities. Well last night all the magic came together and we held the quiz at The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Leeds. It was held in the memory of the former business editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post Nigel Scott. The reason I wanted it to do it was Nigel was a great guy and someone that made us lowly PR people feel at ease. He truly was the nicest journalist I have ever spoken too. I felt an event that brought all of the PR ...

This is an interview with me conducted by sales and motivational speaker and blogger Gavin Ingham, his original post is here. As a sales expert and someone interested in improving lives and businesses in general I strive to ensure that I am doing the best that I can to be at the cutting-edge of what is going on with new selling ideas and strategies. One area that I have some strong opinions about is social media and the uses and abuses of social media. I have shared some of these in previous blogs and will do in the future however for this post I sought out social media expert Chris Norton ...

Google has just launched a huge improvement to its blog search section. Previously if you ran a search for a topic it would bring back posts back with your search term in the title. This was useful but it was almost frustrating that you couldn’t search for blogs on a certain topic. However, now the new service which appears on the left after you have run a search sorts by topic and it seems to be really useful. I did a quick search for blogs that were about ...

I have written various posts on here before about identifying influential sites but I thought it was worth posting today because I have found a tool to use to make this process a whole load quicker. The Google Chrome SEO plug-in takes all of two minutes to install and is in my opinion brilliant. It provides easy access to Search Engine Optimisation Tools that can help with analysis, keyword research, backlink Checks, PageRank Checks and other SEO tasks. Although I have only just started to use this it seems I am late to the party as more than 150,000+ people are involved in the beta programme and I can see why. ...

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 ...

So there we all were scratching our heads wondering how Twitter actually made a profit? And then it decided to change its strategy by scouting the world for talent to hire for its new business team to help secure much needed revenue. Well, the announcement was made today that it has acquired Tweetie but I am not surprised at all and I am expecting a few more acquisitions yet. Only last month we were told that an advertising platform was imminent and that is not the only area Twitter has been looking at. Over the last few months I have been liaising with Twitter’s team directly on a number of things and through ...

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 ...

Those of you who read my blog regularly will know that I like to share information and sites which could be of interest. So if you are even remotely interested in the medical profession or have just always wondered what paramedics and doctors get up to on a day-to-day basis then this list of blogs that I have pulled together might be the one for you. To be honest I have been reading lots of medical based sites recently for a number of reasons and to save you some time trawling the internet I thought I would ...

I read some interesting statistics from a study this morning that has backed up what lots of us working in the social media and online PR world already believed. If you publish regular good quality content on a blogging platform you will get more traffic to your website. In fact, HubSpot is reporting that the study found that businesses which use blogs increase their site traffic by more than half (55%) when compared to to sites which don’t. It found that sites which blogged received: 55% more visitors 97% more inbound links 434% more indexed pages I meet a ...