Happy New Year everyone, I hope you all had lovely Christmases and exciting new years. My Christmas has been spent relaxing and unwinding and seeing friends and family and doing all the things you should during the festive period. My little boy is four and a half now and is getting more and more into computer games and I seem to be getting a new lease of life on them too. My wife bought me Goldeneye Reloaded for the PS3 which can work with the ...

I was reading an article the other day that claimed a positive review on Trip Advisor was now worth £10,000 and hotel owners are now being blackmailed for discounts and threatened with negative reviews if they don’t give them. The article stated: Dozens of customers are using the website’s increasing power to try and get free upgrades or refunds despite nothing wrong with their accommodation. Industry experts have said that a bad rating or review on the popular ratings site can be costly, sometimes to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds in lost bookings. To be honest I didn’t find this story that shocking ...

So I have been  out of the country for a few days in Berlin with one of my clients that manufactures headphones. We were attending IFA2011 which is the biggest consumer electronics show in the world, and as a massive tech/gadget geek I was in my element and felt like a kid at Christmas. I am also a huge dance music fan and used to professionally DJ in clubs when I worked in London and I did manage to become a semi-finalist at the British DJ championships in 2002. Recently I have got back into it ...

So last week I attended a meeting down in Kent with a very senior SEO expert (who shall remain nameless) but who runs a large digital team. He called me and my colleagues in to discuss the possibility of helping them create some interesting and engaging online campaigns. I am always interested when I meet senior people from the SEO world as they often have a different take on things to us public relations types and I find it kind of refreshing to talk about the more geeky side of digital. I asked him how important he now felt social media was now on search. I told him that in the PR industry we have known for a long ...

So Tweetdeck is reportedly selling its platform to Twitter for $50million. I think this is a really positive sign for both Twitter, and UK entrepreneurs in general, as too often it is the US Silicon Valley-based businesses that manage to secure all of the large backing. We have some truly brilliant minds in this country and this proves it. Tweetdeck, is a brilliant platform which has been developed by people in this country. It is a great tool that allows heavy Twitter users like me to update more than 20 ...

This is PROBABLY the coolest video I have seen in a long time. This video has been filmed to help reposition the Carlsberg brand. I have to say Carlsberg have done some pretty clever executions over the last couple of years but this is up there with some of the best. Enjoy.  

I read a great post on the launch of a new page Facebook has launched called Journalists on Facebook. It is Facebook’s attempt to get more journalists using Facebook rather than Twitter but I have my reservations with this as an overall concept. Firstly, I would like to point out that Facebook is brilliant at what it offers to a page admin because you can share a wider range of content with your likes/followers and you can get statistics from a page through its insights section. Add ...

This is the first of three posts I plan to do on the Premier League’s use of social media. I was doing some desktop research for a client the other day and I came across Man Utd’s Facebook page and I noticed it had more than 11 million likes and it got me wondering what amount of likes the other clubs could get, and whether the real table would reflect my Facebook likes table. So I have completed a review of each of the club’s Facebook pages and sorted ...

Here is an interesting concept – everyday we hear more and more about Facebook growing and I read a lot of posts of people asking for new features or making recommendations on how Facebook can change and get better. This has prompted Venessa Miemis to create “The Future of Facebook” project which is basically a campaign to gather enough money together to interview a huge amount of big hitters and ask the big question “What is the future of Facebook?” Let’s hope it’s better than that of Friends Reunited. For the record my view on the future of Facebook is that it will become a mobile hub that allows us to buy, interact, share ...

You might remember that I posted a while back about a social media campaign we have been running for the global music manufacturer Audio-Technica. We ran a social media audit and workshop for them and created an online strategy which included launching the alternative Christmas track competition, which has been a lot of fun to run and organise albeit very busy. In the last few months we have received a huge number of musical entries from all across the world varying in quality and genre. The original aim of the campaign was to seek ...