After a rather interesting discussion with Chris about some really good PR and social media blogs out there and the realisation that no one has a made a list of the very best (we all love a good list – don’t we?) in a long time. I decided to create this, the top 25 UK PR and social media blogs.

Using the Ad Age Power 150, a list of the top English language marketing blogs. I pulled together all the UK PR and social media blogs I could find and decided to see what they were all about. The Power 150 list is created through user submissions. I found a lot of the UK blogs on the list seem to be from agencies who’ve submitted there blog and didn’t really offer much of an insight into the industry. This leads me to add that this isn’t a ‘best of’ list but rather a collection of blogs that could one day prove to be rather helpful.

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They have gone all out on a viral and social campaign by making sure all of their channels have been presented correctly in the form of a social media hub. They have an iphone app, videos, a blog and you can even buy campaign T-shirts.

Their twitter channel has more than 17,000 followers and asks you to use the campaign hashtag #hardandfast – again very clever messaging.

Then they have gone one step further by asking people to sign their online petition to make emergency life skills as part of the national curriculum. The site states:

“Knowing how to stop bleeding, open an airway or perform CPR should be considered as important as knowing your times tables.

“We want to create a new generation of life savers across the UK by ensuring that emergency life support skills (ELS) are taught in all schools and communities.”

I think more people in the UK should learn general first aid as you never know when you might need it.

Well done to all of those involved.

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I have to admit when I opened it and saw it was nine and a half minutes long, I thought there is no way am I watching this, but I actually stuck it out for once and it was fairly impressive.

I have worked for a couple of airlines before and I like to follow what they get up to in the social world as you never know when you will be asked to take part in some blogger outreach programme or some kind of competition. The airlines always tend to have good budgets and seem to have embraced social – mostly because of the whole Jet Blue debacle.

This video seems to be a series of three videos stuck together on three separate elements of the airline’s social media strategy. The first video gives each KLM employee a letter from the alphabet and the real team walk around on screen holding the boards up to respond to tweets to the KLM twitter stream which is just a nice publicity stunt.

The second part/video is monitoring of KLM’s social feeds and the KLM staff reading people’s twitter and social media profiles and then buying the customers small rewards depending on their actual interests stated online. Now this feels a little bit staged to me and a bit for the camera rather than part of a dedicated rewards programme but I like the idea of rewarding your communities and this is what I advise my clients all the time – why should they follow and engage with you when there is another brand down the road that is giving their fans 50% off? 

So I like the idea of directly rewarding people with what they are actually writing about and doing. With that in mind I have always loved KLM and think New York is lovely this time of year – ha ha. However, this responding and rewarding people has, according to the video, managed to reach more than 1,000,000 impressions just on Twitter which isn’t too bad. I like to use monitoring tools to help people that aren’t engaging with us already too and that is probably the next step of KLM’s programme looking for people before they purchase and finding a nice way for the brand to interact with them.

However, my favourite part of this video, is the last of the three videos, in which two dance DJ’s tweet KLM and ask them about flying to the Miami music conference which is a big event in the dance music world. The airline apparently doesn’t travel direct and the KLM team decided to challenge the DJs to get enough dance music fans to sign up to the flight and then they would make it a non-stop journey to Miami.

I really like this because this is getting people to campaign for you rather you campaigning for yourself and we all know that a self fulfilling community is what we are all looking for. The strategy adopted here is not only good customer service but is also a great PR exercise. If I were KLM i would have exposed this one to the maximum and that is what they did. There is a photo-shoot of the DJ’s beat matching on the flight whilst it is in the air and lots of scenes of keen fans getting and dancing on the plane – brilliant. They found out that it was the first time an airline had changed its scheduling following a request from a customer through twitter – again another brilliant news hook. But the PR team went further and went for the (oldest PR trick in the book) Guinness Book of Records for the highest ever dance party – this was a really nice move.

The only downside to this video really is some of it felt a bit too staged and why couldn’t it have been three separate videos and/or all the three but much shorter than almost 10mins.

What do you think? Impressive or too staged?

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This inquiry has come at a bad time really as the newspaper industry is in real trouble let’s not hide from that fact – digital media and generating money from digital media has been the big challenge for them and with more and more people buying tablets and smartphones and getting their news on the move it isn’t going to get any better for them.

However, that said what has happened to some celebrities and victims of murder is just plain filth and it is this type of journalism that should be stamped out. People should be placed in prison for this type of invasion of privacy. When JK Rowling talked about her five year old daughter being targeted by journalists that made me feel slightly ill. I could relate to it as I have a four year old and if I had my little boy approached like that I think I would consider taking drastic action. We wouldn’t accept behaviour like this in normal society but because they are the Paparazzi or journalists they seem to get away with it. Well I think the time is now to stamp this type of journalism out. Yes we want the whistle blowers the political journalists to challenge our Government but we don’t want ordinary people being violated. This is where the legislation needs to focus.

The craving for a new story should never go this far. The clip of JK Rowling at the Inquiry is below. I think the people that have given evidence in this inquiry should be thanked for trying to rid the UK of this nasty, crappy bilge which pretends to be real journalism.

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So last year we organised a pub quiz/soiree in the centre of Leeds and we got around 100 people from the local media and PR companies to come along and fight it out. Although it took a lot of organising I really enjoyed it and so decided to do it all over again.

This year we moved the event to Alea Casino in Clarence Dock which was a great venue and we managed to fill the entire top floor and even had our own free roulette table. The event started at 7pm and went on until late with several different quiz rounds from general knowledge to music. Sadly, my team didn’t win this year, in fact, we came third from bottom but I suppose you can’t win them all.

Nigel’s close family were in attendance and seemed to enjoy the nights proceedings. I have attached a few images of the night to show you what it looked like. I would certainly recommend the Alea as a venue for business events as the top floor can take around 200 people and it looks the part. The food was supplied by James Martin’s restaurant and was lovely.

So I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone that came along and bought tickets to this year’s event. It’s a fun event and it’s great to get everyone from the PR industry in one room together. Last night we managed to raise around £2,000 for the charities and so I am very happy today.

The Businessdesk.com and The Yorkshire Evening Post will also be doing their own write ups over the next few days.

If you were at the event, please leave a comment and let me know what you thought. I want to use the feedback to make the event even better next year. Thanks.

The leader board looked like this:

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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 place an offer on Twitter?” – I think I am going to explode.

Now I know it is my job to advise and consult and that’s what I try to do but I still find it immensely frustrating when people ask for things that simply won’t work. It used to be the same with the following statement “Let’s make a viral video” thankfully I think we have moved on from that space now because videos trying to be virals often don’t work and they can cost a fortune.

My point is this, if you use social media to share something purely commercial, yes it will have an effect, a very small effect but an effect all the same. However, if you think about how you can help people talk about something rather than trying to sell to them all the time you will find that you get a far, far better result. The marketing of anything should always be strategic, so why is it different for digital channels? The truth is it isn’t and you and I both know this!

So let’s try to stamp out this feeling that we should market everything possible in the vague hope that it may sell one more product because if you actually sit and think it through you may well find you have a fan, follower or better yet a customer for life, not just for that one product!

Does this happen to you? If so share your stories with me as I am genuinely interested. Tell me how you get around people that simply don’t understand how and when social media should be used.

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We have moved it to a new venue in Alea Casino, which means we have increased the amount of tickets from 100–180 people and the quiz master will be  James Wilson of Fresh Radio who has very kindly volunteered his services for nothing.

I started the quiz because I felt we needed to hold a regional event that brought together the local Yorkshire based PR companies, consultants and the local media in a social type event that would be fun rather than serious and all for a good cause.

So to help raise funds for Nigel’s chosen charities we have again decided to organise our now annual quiz night. Tickets only cost £20 per person and include food, and hopefully everyone will be able to attend this year. So if you fancy coming along get your ticket now through our Eventbrite page here.

I will look forward to seeing you all there.

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‘Twitter is being used to exchange messages and discuss the riots in the way that previous generations used technology such as phone, email and SMS.

‘To claim that Twitter had a role in the Tottenham riots is as credible as placing the blame at the hands of mobile phone handset manufacturers or mobile operators.’

I totally agree and added my thoughts which were:

I don’t think we can blame Twitter entirely as it cannot moderate every single piece of content on its network in real-time. All it can do is remove any inflammatory accounts when they are highlighted to its team.

‘I don’t think Twitter is to blame here, that is just the communication tool selected by these individuals. If they didn’t use Twitter they would simply find another communication method, whether that is Facebook, email, text message or carrier pigeon. It really doesn’t matter because if people want to get together and cause trouble they can do it pretty easily.’

So Twitter isn’t to blame, what will be interesting will be whether we will now see those that tweeted about this being prosecuted? My guess is yes they will and that might cause people to think twice before trying to use Twitter to create anarchy again but unfortunately I don’t think this is the last of the violence just yet.

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Then there is the all important client phone call afterwards and you are told you have won the project! You all do the victory dance (maybe even a few whoop whoops) and the team is buzzing excitedly and then you suddenly realise that the client has chosen the one idea you put in, for creativity purposes, and now you have to make it actually work GULP! (Joking of course!)

So there are some pitches that go really really well and there are others that die on their back sides. I remember pitching to the Home Office for the launch of a big campaign at the COI many years ago. There was a six-strong team of us, including the chief executive of the agency, and we had been pitching for almost 90 minutes and we finished our passionate presentation and the chief executive ended it by saying: “So that’s our campaign ideas over with, do you have any questions?”

To which one of the main guys replied: “Not really, I just feel your campaign fundamentally lacks credibility”.

Now, I should point out that I remember that statement word for word as the words stuck and held in the air. In fact, I am sure time actually stood still for those few seconds. However, not to be beaten we somehow turned it around in the questions, and actually won the business, which just goes to show if you take criticism on the chin instead of defending an idea a client doesn’t like sometimes you can still come out on the winning side.

I saw a really interesting tweet yesterday from Leeds PR consultant Richard Rawlins who said he had lost a pitch and the client in question had then passed on his agency’s ideas and the winning agency would be using them.  The full details of the conversation are enclosed in the image on the right have a read of them.

So that lead me to think a few things really. Firstly, what a total unethical thing to do to a great bunch of people who have worked their butts off to come up with these ideas, but I have to admit it has happened to me before.

Secondly, if we (PR Professionals) write copyright throughout our presentations does that mean they are our ideas and our intellectual property? So if a client does use our idea can we sue them or should they pay for our ideas if they wish to use them?

Personally, I can’t see a PR agency suing a client for it as it would look bad to any future clients. In public relations we all seem happy to pitch for free whereas in other marketing specialisms agencies are paid handsomely for their ideas. Are we moving with the times or should we (as an industry) start charging for pitches to stop this kind of thing from happening?

I welcome your thoughts.

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You would have to have been hidden under an extremely large rock this week to miss the story about a twitter user revealing the details of celebrity super injunctions on Twitter. In fact, it even made the 10’o clock news last night and my first thought was why?

Various people confirmed on Twitter last week the details of the married footballer – in fact he was even trending on Twitter. So it wasn’t exactly news – it had been on Twitter for more than a week. So why all the sudden exposure?

Super-injunctions are issued by the courts to protect people from what they see as their right to privacy from the media. If it is a super injunction even the fact that an injunction has been granted, or the name of the person applying for it, must be kept secret. It was revealed yesterday that no super-Injunctions have even been issued this year, these are just injunctions (no super) and that is why we are all hearing so much about them.

It seems the latest fashion, if you want to sleep with a hooker, and you are a celebrity is to get a gagging order (too many jokes not enough time).

So this user was revealing the details of who they felt were the guilty parties except they got several details incorrect. This is another problem, twitter is an echo-chamber, a place where we share news, thoughts, advice, feelings and facts. Facts that can actually be wrong. Yes as humans we do get things wrong. So now the discussion has moved onto can this person actually be prosecuted?  Err no they can’t and do they want to anyway?

There were various lawyers on the radio yesterday saying they could force twitter to reveal the twitter user’s account details. What is that going to achieve? The Twitter account could have been set-up with a fake email address – so you may never know who it was. Also who cares who it was anyway? If you did find them are the celebrities in question going to sue them? And if so what are they going to get? Probably nothing.

Twitter is for conversation albeit it is conversation online that can be found and shared. Super injunctions are used to stop newspapers covering a story and if they do the celebrity in question can then sue for damages. They can’t sue for much here though – it would cost more than they would probably get?

Commenting on BBC News, Lord Falconer said:

"If a point is reached as a matter of evidence when everyone knows who the injunctions are about then they become pretty pointless. It sounds like it’s very difficult to make sure that injunctions like this are complied with."

My point exactly, social media super injunctions will never work because it is too easy to set up fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook or any other network for that matter. The fact that the people sharing these stories don’t have much money makes the appeal of suing them far less I am sure. Worse still, if the celebrity does sue then they are confirming the story is true anyway therefore making the process totally pointless.

My advice to celebrities and footballers would be stop sleeping with prostitutes in the first place.

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