Year: 2009

Those of you who read my blog regularly will know that I like to share information and sites which could be of interest. So if you are even remotely interested in the medical profession or have just always wondered what paramedics and doctors get up to on a day-to-day basis then this list of blogs that I have pulled together might be the one for you. To be honest I have been reading lots of medical based sites recently for a number of reasons and to save you some time trawling the internet I thought I would share some of ... Read more

Are you looking to build up your Facebook friends or overall fan base on one of your pages? If you are, you will be pleased to hear that you don’t have to work hard on building better relationships with people anymore because you can now buy friends instead. Yes you heard me correctly, according to Advertising Age you can buy them in groups of thousands – how wrong is that? So you can now go out and buy yourself, or your client, some friends to become fans of your pages. Advertising Age reports: “The folks at online ad firm uSocial ... Read more

I read a story this morning in Revolution Magazine and found it rather interesting. An online newspaper has launched in the US which uses a clever algorithm to identify news content on social networks and then republishes the news on its site. Revolution reports in its story: Tewspaper is not endorsed or sponsored by any social network sites, but uses proprietary technology to filter through the large amounts of obscure data. “We began by limiting the news to trusted authorities on Twitter,” said Jared Lamb, the creator of Tewspaper. “From there, we are working on an algorithm that can find ... Read more

This morning I have been taking a look at UBar a new online community developed by Phones4U. It has created the community to get better quality feedback from its customers on its products and services and of course to market to potential customers. My first impression is it has been designed rather well, and it’s quite easy and fun to use, as you click on the relevant images to choose your answer for each question. It also doesn’t take itself too seriously with questions like: What is your marital status? To which I had to choose the option “married with ... Read more

I read some interesting statistics from a study this morning that has backed up what lots of us working in the social media and online PR world already believed. If you publish regular good quality content on a blogging platform you will get more traffic to your website. In fact, HubSpot is reporting that the study found that businesses which use blogs increase their site traffic by more than half (55%) when compared to to sites which don’t. It found that sites which blogged received: 55% more visitors 97% more inbound links 434% more indexed pages I meet a lot ... Read more

I attended an SEO conference last week because I wanted to do some initial research and listen to how SEO practitioners are presenting social media as part of the online marketing mix. I have always known that what I do for my clients, as a social media specialist and public relations practitioner, is (hopefully) writing good content and providing strategic communications counsel. If you write good quality online content a useful by-product of that is its search engine benefits as people (e.g.your site’s readers) should want to read and share that content. However, what I found most interesting at this ... Read more

The musician Dave Carroll was taking a trip to Nebraska when he and his band members noticed that their guitars were being broken outside. After complaining to the culprits (United Airlines staff) and getting nowhere he decided to write a song which I have to admit is pretty catchy. It turns out that the song is so catchy that 3.7million people have now watched his video and it has propelled him to a new level of stardom. In fact, the track is in the top 20 in Canada. It just goes to show what a good idea, some humour and ... Read more

I wrote about this topic a while ago now on my blog basically saying that although it had lost it’s novelty factor as the new thing to do online, blogging still has a vital role to play in communications for companies of all sizes. Blogging is still a great way to publish your thoughts and opinions and share them with your readers and peers. Twitter on the other hand is a great tool which is much more instant. In my opinion, you can’t really position yourself or your clients as a thought leader using just Twitter – sure, you can ... Read more

If you haven’t seen it yet, here is the latest viral doing the rounds from Evian, which has secured almost 6.5million views on YouTube.

Yesterday, I was searching the web to find a useful list of walking bloggers based in the UK and I couldn’t find much to help apart from a couple of decent walking magazines. So in order to help anyone else who is interested in rambling or hill walking, I thought I would create my own list. So here are my top 15 walking and rambling blogs written in the UK. I created this list by reading and reviewing each site and have used my own personal preference. I have found that most good walking blogs focus on useful advice and ... Read more