The musician Dave Carroll was taking a trip to Nebraska when he and his band members noticed that their guitars were being broken outside. After complaining to the culprits (United Airlines staff) and getting nowhere he decided to write a song which I have to admit is pretty catchy. It turns out that the song is so catchy that 3.7million people have now watched his video and it has propelled him to a new level of stardom. In fact, the track is in the top 20 in Canada. It just goes to show what a good idea, some humour and a catchy riff can achieve on the Internet through social media. According to Rolling Stone: ...

I wrote about this topic a while ago now on my blog basically saying that although it had lost it's novelty factor as the new thing to do online, blogging still has a vital role to play in communications for companies of all sizes. Blogging is still a great way to publish your thoughts and opinions and share them with your readers and peers. Twitter on the other hand is a great tool which is much more instant. In my opinion, you can't really position yourself or your clients as a thought leader using just Twitter - sure, you can share useful/interesting links and funny bits but there is a limit to what 140 characters can achieve. ...

Yesterday, I was searching the web to find a useful list of walking bloggers based in the UK and I couldn't find much to help apart from a couple of decent walking magazines. So in order to help anyone else who is interested in rambling or hill walking, I thought I would create my own list. So here are my top 15 walking and rambling blogs written in the UK. I created this list by reading and reviewing each site and have used my own personal preference. I have found that most good walking blogs focus on useful advice and tips for where and when to go. I also noticed that many contain some amazing photography ...

A recent report from the Associated Press has revealed that in the US the FTC is considering regulating the blogosphere. The reason it is considering this is to stop undisclosed sponsored blog posts. Frederic Lardinois comments: According to the FTC, bloggers who don't disclose that they received freebies once these new rules go into effect could become the target on an FTC investigation. These new guidelines (PDF), possibly with modifications, will most likely go into effect later this summer, and would mark the first time that the FTC tries to patrol the blogosphere. I have to agree that I dislike the idea of conversation which has been created by blatant give-aways which are not revealed to ...

I have just read a very interesting post from Stan Schroeder regarding Twitter usage in May 2009. In his post Stan discusses a new Harvard Business Review study as revealing: Most Twitter users don’t actually use the service much, or even at all. In fact, 10% of active users are responsible for over 90% of all Tweets. To be honest I think we should have noticed this ourselves. Many of my former colleagues and contacts have starting Twittering in the last six months some very regularly and some more sporadically. What I have noticed is with most of them the immediate enthusiasm seems to die off after a few days. If people kept ...

I may be a bit late to reply on this but there has been quite a bit of coverage on blogging being dead following an article written in Wired, so I have decided to write this post to tell you that it isn’t dead at all! Blogging has changed the way many people receive their news, report it and express opinions on it. The most recent Technorati report highlighted that there are now 133 million blogs. It also found that almost half (42%) of bloggers spend between 3-10 hours ...

Yesterday, I was speaking to a friend who works in the public sector and they asked me if I would explain the blogger outreach process and how to target bloggers properly without getting burnt. We have been busy at work over the last few weeks, reading, commenting and engaging with bloggers from lots of different sectors, so I felt pretty well drilled to give her my thoughts. As I started to explain the difference between media relations and blogger relations, I began to realise that there was one major difference that I needed ...

I have been reading lots of posts about the time it takes to manage social media, ProBlogger recently asked the question: "How long does it take for you to write a blog post?" and after 294 comments the average seemed to be around an hour. I have also been reading interesting posts from Richard Millington and Sally Whittle detailing how many types of communisation they receive a day. Richard got to 89 different types and Sally received more than 169 emails in 24 hours - that's quite a lot of emails to have to reply ...

There was an interesting article (paywall) which appeared in the last edition of PR Week which underlined a number of points I have been making in pitches to new clients recently. The main one is that search engine optimisation (SEO) has changed and is continuing to change and although buying into link farms and using SEO specific companies still works to a certain extent there is now a new kid on the block for getting high rankings on Google and that is using digital communications effectively....

Stuart Bruce has tagged me with the 'Eight things you don't know about me' meme. So here goes: I came sixth in the British DJ Championships at Earls Court in London and lost in the finals to the overall winner who went on to play across Ibiza in the following summer. My favourite food is Pizza (New York Pizza is the best) and I hate eggs. I was part of a jury which had to decide on a case which included a well organised drug smuggling ring. The jury also included the deputy editor of the Sunday Times and a well known author....