Year: 2015

We all know Facebook is the behemoth of the social media world, our clients have to use it, and now it’s gone pay to play, we all have to spend our budgets to use it to get some kind of decent reach, unless you are in the camp that says it’s time to ignore the platform altogether. So with that in mind you would think that Facebook would have a killer customer service team that would be agile, friendly, adaptable and helpful to get you to spend your money in the correct areas right? WRONG! Firstly, try finding their phone ... Read more

With George Osborne’s latest budget announcement expected on Wednesday, there are a lot of rumours flying around, one of which will be a reduction or removal of Entrepreneur’s Relief, and there has been a lot of rhetoric about the Government’s Northern Powerhouse initiative. The initiative is looking at devolution and how Westminster is going to shift some of the power from London to the regions, which made me think about our role up here and whether this would ever trickle down into our beloved industry of public relations. Sure, we might get a faster HS2 line connecting us better and ... Read more

German designers have supposedly created a mobile bar-tending robot that collects a user’s personal data from Facebook to produce their ‘ideal’ drink. Using an algorithm developed by the University of Cambridge, the robot computes an individual personality analysis to create a test tube shot based on psychology’s ‘big five’ personality traits model. The five different ingredients each represent a different trait; agreeableness (green), conscientiousness (clear), extroversion (yellow), neuroticism (red) and openness (blue). Based on the data acquired through Facebook, the percentage level of each personality trait control’s the percentage of each of the ingredient in the drink, making it unique and ... Read more

Yesterday I jumped on a plane and headed across to Ireland after being personally invited to Growth Hack Talks by a friend of mine, Ben Cotton. He managed to convince me to get off my backside, jump on  a plane and go and listen to a few other clever marketing people speak for once. The reason I decided to go was because it was on a subject, which had caught my eye, and which is still relatively new to us here in the UK. If you want to be successful in the marketing space you have to keep looking out ... Read more

This is a clever little idea from KFC in Romania, the concept is you get free KFC whenever your social media sites go offline. I think the video is meant to highlight how much we depend on them these days, it is a clever piece of fun but they have also made a dedicated website, where users can register their details so whenever your social media is down you can get a free meal. I love the concept and quite a well-executed video as well. Nice work KFC.

As you are probably aware over the last few months I have been interviewing PR practitioners from all over the world as part of my interview series called 20:20 Vision. The concept of these interviews is that I ask each practitioner 20 questions about themselves and they give us a brief glimpse into their working lives and what makes them tick. Most of the people I speak with will have a strong interest in digital, online or modern public relations strategy. The first interview was with Arik C. Hanson and a while ago I interviewed Crosby Noricks the founder of ... Read more

I love this stunt to help generate buzz and awareness of the new Mission Impossible film ROGUE NATION. An agency transformed the Hollywood and Highland mall into an obstacle course, where contestants could win real tickets to the world premiere in Vienna. It even ran on “America’s Got Talent” a couple weeks before the film opened. Simon Pegg is seen challenging passers by in true MI style to run a gauntlet of tests and the whole thing was captured on video. Great work, and brilliant fun by the looks of it. All they needed was the travellator from Gladiators.

Over the last five to ten years we have seen a big shift in how blogs are being used, I myself remember starting my personal blog back in 2007 and a number of my colleagues thought I was crazy. Who will read that? How will people find it? Why bother wasting your time with that? These were just some of the jibes/questions I received. Here is my first post, I Just re-read it and it made me wince a tad. Blogging was certainly not the cool thing to do back then and the technology was not that great for doing ... Read more

I have been interviewing PR practitioners from all over the world as part of my interview series called 20:20 Vision. The concept of these interviews is that I ask each practitioner 20 questions about themselves and they give us a brief glimpse into their working lives and what makes them tick. Most of the people I speak with will have a strong interest in digital, online or modern public relations strategy. My first interview was with Arik C. Hanson and a few weeks ago I interviewed Crosby Noricks the founder of PR Couture and co-presenter of the entry-level fashion PR ... Read more

I have been busy this week at Prohibition HQ, reading this and that, but something that really stood out to me was the interesting annual study on Social Journalism which is conducted each year by Cision and Canterbury Christ Church University. Each year the results chart the changing ways journalists and media professionals use social media for their work and in their communication with us, the good old PR professionals. The report isn’t commissioned just in this country as it gathers data from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, Sweden and Australia. So it’s very interesting to check out, as ... Read more