Month: May 2012

The last month in web marketing terms has been very interesting indeed, many PR people don’t often worry themselves with what Google is up to, in terms of its updates, and to be honest 90% of the time they don’t need to. However, the latest update to Google has caused a rather large disturbance in the force for companies that specialise in search engine optimisation or SEO to you and me. Google Penguin was updated on April 24th 2012 and what it has changed is quite significant. It’s not long since we heard about Google Panda getting rid of “black ... Read more

Today I came across a clever new twitter application that offers people the chance to donate the remaining characters from their tweets in order to raise awareness of the charity Help for Heroes. It is all part of a wider campaign called https://www.hashtags4heroes.com/. The campaign has been created for the whole month of May (which in PR terms is Military Appreciation Month) to raise awareness for Wounded Warrior Project (WWP) and injured service members. Every time a user tweets during the time period, the application will autofill any unused Twitter characters with messages that help  spread the word about their ... Read more

Last week I joined a panel debate at the University of York for its Careers Service in front of several hundred students to discuss jobs in the creative sector. It was a fascinating debate with people from across the country spanning several different specialisms. There were representatives from consumer insight , advertising, PR and social media marketing companies. There were people from Ogilvy, The Labour Party and Aviva and it made for an interesting discussion. I went with my Prohibition hat on to explain what students can do for jobs in this sector and in this region. I think we ... Read more

This week we have just been putting the finishing touches to this new Facebook application called The Messy Garden which we have had built for a client. The client has issued some academic research on sustainable gardens and the benefits of having a messy section in your garden to attract bees and other insects. The brief for this campaign was to make sustainable gardening more accessible and to reach out to a new demographic that doesn’t normally think about gardening. The team are doing a great job on the usual traditional media relations campaign which includes us showcasing a garden ... Read more

I came across an interesting online campaign this week which I thought was rather recently, Club Individual is the free membership programme from the Individual Restaurant Group which owns the Piccolino’s Restaurant chain as well as Restaurant Bar & Grill, Bank and Zinc. They have been dipping their toe into social media recently and their latest campaign caught my eye.  Here’s a YouTube clip they pulled together to give you a flavour:   They are giving their members the chance for a trip to Verona to see an opera at the famed Arena di Verona and meet the Montresor family ... Read more

We attended the Yorkshire Business Market yesterday and it was interesting to take a new view on how things in the business and marketing world are changing and have evolved over the last six years. When I started blogging, many years and moons ago, there weren’t many people talking about social media apart from the geeks and bloggers of course. In fact, when my team and I used to pitch way back in 2008 for as we called it then “Word of Mouth Marketing Briefs” we were often doing so non-competitively and this was for a number of global brands. ... Read more