I had to share this video as I spotted this campaign on the news this morning and I think it is a brilliant campaign from the British Heart Foundation that has combined humour with a serious issue. Many people in the UK don’t know how to give CPR when someone is in cardiac arrest and the idea of doing it to the music of Staying Alive is just genius as it makes memorable. If it saves one person's life it will be a campaign worth doing and I think it has been executed beautifully. ...

I have noticed quite a number of corporate blogs recently that have been updated regularly but they don’t seem to be acting socially. It’s called social media for a reason because it is two way – so pushing corporate content in one direction is just one element of the process. I have been working in online PR for a number of years now and I have definitely noticed that a lot more marketers accept that blogging does have major SEO benefits. Halleluiah - our work is now done then and we can all relax. Hang on a minute… In this post I am not going to bang on about writing online content just for Google ...

Another rant I am afraid. I am sick of coming across extremely poor blogs that are being used as dumping grounds by SEO people to leave links and point them towards their client’s main websites. I really don’t see the longevity in this process – it’s wrong and Google and Bing will get wise to it and stop you in the end anyway. Yes blogging can be used to help SEO but please god don’t write terrible, dull content just because it includes your client’s brand name all of the time. Surely, you want these new links to mean something and good quality content is going to have much more longevity than a dull written post. For instance, if you ...

Last Thursday, I spent the evening presenting on social media in the finance sector to a room of delegates at Grant Thornton. When I present I prefer to use real life case studies of work that I have completed myself with my teams. However, when I came to the Q&A section I was asked a question which I found quite difficult to answer. They said: “I can see all of the benefits of running integrated campaigns in social media but what are the downsides to using social media?” I really struggled with this (granted I was stood up in front of about 60 delegates so I was on the spot a bit) so I thought for a while. And all ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This is the first guest post I have had on my blog and it’s from Nick Hill, a director at Binary Vision. I have known Nick for a while now and seen him speak several times, his knowledge and expertise in behaviour and interpersonal skills are extremely impressive and I thought it would be interesting to hear his take on client management in the PR industry. He works with quite a few marketing and public relations firms and the feedback I have heard from his clients has been astounding as he really knows his stuff. Nick uses the latest psychology tools to transform team members into high performers that in turn create more business. His programmes focus ...