Adrian Bridgwater, a freelance journalist and social media friend of mine tweeted yesterday that he was going to share his golden rules of public relations. I have been following Adrian for a while now and I find his insights, from the other side of the fence, interesting. So I started to read some of these rules and although most were obvious and clear common sense I could tell that PR professionals had broken a lot of them pretty regularly. So if you if you want to avoid any mishaps ...

I was tweeted this morning by my good friend Adrian Johnson who was recently inspired by the PR Week Power Player list which is based on the original PR Week Social Media Power Players list. The PR Week list has been created by Andrew Bruce Smith and Adrian decided to create his own list of PR power players in Yorkshire and amazingly somehow little old me has come out as the number one.  Now I would like to think this is down to my own ingrained natural writing talent ...

The last couple of weeks have been interesting because there have been some fascinating developments in the world of media. One of those new developments was the creation of a new site called Churnalism. The site has been created by The Media Standards Trust to basically identify where copied press release text is being lifted from and used. On Chunalism you can do the following according to the news release (whoops I have pasted it sorry): Compare a press release with more than 3 million articles published by national newspaper websites, the BBC or Sky News since 2008 See the percentage of a press release cut and pasted into news articles, and the number of characters that overlap See ...

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 ...

I was reading my feeds this morning and came across this little gem from our friend Darren Rowse at Problogger. He has put together a nice infogrpahic on what makes the perfect blogger outreach campaign. I have worked on a lot of blogger outreach campaigns over the last few years and one of the first things I ask the client is what is in it for the blogger and his/her readers not just your marketing campaign? If there isn’t anything in it for both of them and the company then I tell them that it isn’t right for blogger outreach – it’s that simple. I get a lot of PR approaches myself, some good, some bad ...

In November a good friend of mine Charlotte Britton, conducted a survey with businesses in Yorkshire to find out how companies in the region were utilising social media marketing. One of the most interesting statistics I noticed was that 75% said social media had been responsible for creating positive PR about the company and 40% saying social media had helped mitigate PR problems. Those are quite bold statements but here are some of the other interesting headline statistics: 82% of respondents said they used LinkedIn to promote their business with 67% saying there key individuals were using LinkedIn to promote ...

I am always reading (or viewing infographics) on the latest statistics about Facebook’s mobile usage increasing, Bebo being on the decline and more recently MySpace teaming up with Facebook as it moves away from being a social network to being seen as an entertainment platform. However, the study that has stood out to me this week has one been undertaken by Seomoz which looked into why people start blogs and use social media. An article in emarketer states: Nearly 71% of respondents said they use social media as part of their SEO strategy. Improving visibility was the primary reason nearly a fifth ...

A friend of mine dropped me a note about this new campaign yesterday and I thought it was worth discussing on the blog. JustGiving, the UK’s largest online fundraising platform, and the international children’s charity War Child have teamed up with Sports Interactive and SEGA’s ‘Football Manager™’ in a cause-related marketing partnership launched this week. Football Manager 2011, which is amazingly now in its sixth series, will include the charity's’ banners on the virtual advertising boards alongside the pitch, which when clicked, will actually allow users to make donations to War Child through the JustGiving website. I have seen advertising on ...

It’s been a busy few months over in the Dinosaur caves, we have scooped a number of new social media accounts and we also have a few new team members who will be revealing themselves to you shortly I expect. I don’t normally cover that many case studies on the blog but I decided recently that I am going to try and do more of this. This is mainly because when I have been speaking at events, people really seem to prick up and listen more at the case study section. I think most people prefer to here about ...

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) - ...