Year: 2012

I have just logged into my Facebook pages today and noticed something rather interesting. Facebook seems to have rolled out a new feature that allows you to invite your Facebook friends to your Facebook page. This takes me back a few years when they used to do that with Facebook groups but I beleive they removed it due to the amount of spamming that was happening because of the feature. The inability to invite people to pages is one of the reasons there are so many companies out there using Facebook wrongly and adding friends to a standard Facebook profiles. ... Read more

This week I have been doing quite a bit of analysis and research into bloggers and online influencers. This has become part of my day job reading, researching and engaging and I am often asked by other PR professionals to give recommendations on some of the tools that I use. So I thought a quick post on a few might help. To make this test fair I have used a local theme park that my family and I like to visit called Flamingo Land as I thought it would be a bit more fun that the usual corporate stuff. 1. ... Read more

I was listening to the Today programme this morning with James Naughtie presenting and he was interviewing the chief executive of RBS Stephen Hester. No sooner did we get into the interview and Mr Hester was asked if his salary wasn’t enough. This really irritated me – I am sick of this media witch hunt against this guy that is trying to do his job. Let’s get something straight – he wasn’t a banker before the banking crisis of 2008 which meant he wasn’t involved in any of the mistakes of the previous regime. He was taken on board to ... Read more

This is a guest post written by good friend and colleague Zubair, you can follow him on Twitter @souljaof4tune and read his blog here. 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 ... Read more

I love this short clip, in it Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy hit back at Fox News during a press conference here in the UK following the London Premiere of their new film. You can’t tell me you haven’t seen the publicity for it as these two have been doing the rounds on every TV and radio show going. Fox News had publically criticized the film for supposedly pushing a ‘dangerous liberal agenda’ at kids. Which in my view is ridiculous. I love the fact that the Muppets hold press conferences – we should get these guys back on ... Read more

Facebook has today announced its new edit feature which allows users and page administrators to edit their statuses after they have been posted. According to the latest research 94% of all Facebook users have actually deleted posts due to typos and poor mistakes in Facebook updates because there was previously no edit function. The recent launch of Google+ has forced the more established social network to raise its game by releasing a whole new set of features. I bet you have been reading this and thinking brilliant, thanks Chris that is really useful. Well sorry it’s not true but the ... Read more

The video below reminds me of the Will it Blend campaign where they did something rather extreme to a gadget to show how impressive it is. In the case of Will it Blend they placed an iPad into a blender and blended into dust which made for a clever campaign that went viral on YouTube and moved the brand from a lowly position to a top ten blender brand. It also opened up a whole new market as men watched the video and wanted the best blender on the planet. So with that in mind the video below is from ... Read more

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. They have gone all out on ... Read more

Happy New Year everyone, I hope you all had lovely Christmases and exciting new years. My Christmas has been spent relaxing and unwinding and seeing friends and family and doing all the things you should during the festive period. My little boy is four and a half now and is getting more and more into computer games and I seem to be getting a new lease of life on them too. My wife bought me Goldeneye Reloaded for the PS3 which can work with the PS3 Move stick. I have been playing it for most of the Christmas break and ... Read more