As you will probably already know I work for a social media and public relations consultancy based in Leeds. At work we have a team blog which all the guys here contribute too. In fact, we even have work experience students who also post their own individual items. We  let them do this to ensure they get proper public relations experience and everyone in the team gets to have their own opinions heard. However, recently this has caused me to think - do people think that a team blog is the actual view of the company? Some people may think this so but I have to say no. In our company, as with ...

I have just arrived back at Wolfstar HQ this morning and whilst running through my emails I felt I better write something about my relaxing week off. Last week, I decided to have some time off and take my wife and little boy away for the week. So we booked a trip to Hackness Grange in the Yorkshire Dales as it looked quite peaceful. It's situated about 15 minutes drive from Scarborough in North Yorkshire and about 25 mins from Whitby. Unfortunately, we didn't get brilliant weather all the time but we did get to enjoy some fantastic ...

I have seen a few interesting articles this morning reporting that social media hasn't been utilised as much as was expected by UK advertisers. It seems that British advertisers are still lagging behind those of the US who have been exploiting social networking effectively. My post yesterday referred to me being approached and that was actually by a US company - so they may have a point that US companies are doing it more. That said, we have been approached by several UK companies attempting outreach programmes recently and some have been done well and some not so ...

Well not a day goes by that we don't seem to be sent a new social networking tool to test out at Wolfstar and no sooner have we have all started using Doplr and Twitter in our daily lives and along comes another service called Friendfeed. FriendFeed claims it enables us to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that our friends and family are sharing  giving us a way to discuss interesting information amongst friends. As with any social networking tool you can invite your friends from your email accounts and ...

I picked up The Guardian this morning and read an interesting article by Mark Sweney about the Financial Times which plans to create an exclusive social network. The proposed scheme will be a membership only network costing a fee of £2k a year for each lucky networker. The Guardian describes the membership as including: "attendance at any one FT Global conference plus 20% off subsequent events, face-to-face members' networking events and a 12-month premium subscription to FT.com." Oh I think I should point out that the FT will also be using your details to ...

I have just read an interesting post from Roy Gleenslade reporting that online unique users and circulation figures will now be added together in a new report format for the first time - this is a big step forward. He reports: "It will reveal that all-important measure known as "the reach" achieved by publications by detailing both month-on-month and year-on-year figures for on-line and newsprint. "The new "multi-platform monthly report" will also break out figures by geographical region; the UK, Republic of Ireland and other countries. "The initiative follows requests from advertisers, agencies and media owners because it will undoubtedly ...

I have been contacted today and due to my interest in Netvibes, kindly asked if I would write about Pageflakes which is yet another Ajax based personalised homepage. I currently use Netvibes to access my email, Facebook, Twitter, weather, football and business news, YouTube and eBay - although I am considering ending my Poweseller status with eBay after the recent revelations on negative feedback which I wrote/ranted about recently. With Pageflakes, you can sign in quickly to the website, add url's ('flakes') to your page ...

Bond fans are getting the chance to become part of 007 history by getting the opportunity to write the music to the new Bond movie. Unfortunately, I think my musical talent doesn't stretch this far but I am sure there will be a lot of people out there who would be interested. I am a huge bond fan and would love to be associated with anything bond related. Penguin announced its search for the theme tune to Devil May Care, the eagerly awaited new Bond novel, written by Sebastian Faulks. Visitors to ...

I read an interesting article in the Guardian this morning which said Nokia are reportedly in meetings with Facebook to try and develop a mobile version of the social networking site. The article states: "Facebook already offers its own mobile application that can be used to upload photos, notes and to exchange messages on the site, and a look-up function for phone numbers." I must say that it would appeal to the millions of people who commute everyday who are stuck with nothing to read on the train. The simple functionality of being ...

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....