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 ...

If you follow me on Twitter, you will have no doubt been seeing my recent tweets about the charity pub quiz I organise for the regional committee of the CIPR. I hate plugging things too much but the pub quiz was to raise money for a charitable cause that was deeply close to my heart. A journalist friend of mine called Nigel Scott sadly died of cancer in 2009 and so collectively we decided to hold a fun event last year to honour him and ...

Sorry about this but I need to have a quick rant. I have been working in PR for more than a decade and using social media for around five years and the shift I have seen in the understanding levels of social media marketing has been great as the industry develops. I saw a piece the other day about Sony hiring one agency to do everything and thought, brilliant, people are finally getting it. However, one of my big bug bears now is that people seem to want to use social media on a purely tactical basis rather than actually thinking things through properly. They look for the easy quick win. If I hear another question like this “can you just ...

If you are like me I imagine you have read quite a few posts before that give the usual advice about writing interesting and engaging content. Well I didn’t want to write something completely about the theory because I am always covering that type of stuff on here. As most of you know I manage a lot of social media communities for companies and brands of all sizes some regional, some national and others on a global basis. One thing I have noticed is that things have changed significantly in social media and online PR over the ...

I love it when somebody uses social media a little differently, rather than following the sheep and simply setting up the usual channels. I like it even more when someone goes out there and tries to do something a bit creative and different. Step forward musician Imogen Heap, who is well known for a being a big social media advocate. Imogen has created a dedicated microsite for her latest project, which cleverly has a #hashtag as its working title. Here is how she explains it: #heapsong1 is the working title of ...

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 ...

Client’s are constantly asking me about search engine optimisation and to help everyone I decided to put together this simple 10 golden rules of SEO. Search engines loves great content - The better the content is structured and written on your website, the more Google will read and search the content of your website and other people will read it as well. Keywords should be written naturally into the content of each individual page of the website in order to ensure the site is well optimised for search engines. Keywords in title tag (unique for each page, include keywords) - ...

I was presenting at the Wealth Enhancement Forum last week on social media and the business opportunity it presents. I was asked several months back if I would do it and I said I would be happy to share my thoughts with the group. I managed to get about five slides into a presentation before the quick fire round started and the questions started to come thick and fast. I found it extremely interesting to hear this group of wealthy business owners talking about social networks and the varying ways in which they or their staff use them. I will be honest here and say that most of my clients tend to be marketing directors ...

My good friends over at Rising Digital, a social media and word of mouth marketing consultancy which specialises in the music industry, has created a new ‘Lite’ division to help talented artists break into the British market. I know all the guys over there and we have worked together on various projects from time to time. Rising Digital has an impressive roster of clients including the Gorillaz, chart sensation Swedish House Mafia, DJ Mag Top 10 Sander van Doorn, BBC Radio 1's 'In new DJs we trust' Alex Metric, Mercury award winner Ms Dynamite and many more. ...

Facebook has announced today that due to popular demand it is adding a new button/feature to Facebook pages. Traditionally, users were asked to become fans of a page but that was changed a few months back. Facebook users are now asked to like a particular product or service and when they do this like is then added to their personal profile. This is also what Facebook uses to select which advertisements to display in a user’s account. When a user has liked a product or service they then receive all of the updates from that page within their newsfeed. This is brilliant if you really love that particular brand and want to stay on top of what ...