Year: 2016

I received an email this morning from The Competition and Markets Authority(CMA), that prickled my interest, it was about an SEO company that has been forced to cease writing fake online reviews for small businesses and remove those already posted.  The investigation into Total SEO & Marketing Ltd, a search engine optimisation company, found that between 2014 and 2015 it had written more than 800 fake positive reviews for 86 small businesses that were published across 26 different websites which contain customer reviews. Now I know this happens but I thought this type of black hat work was mainly based ... Read more

Seller Ratings and Quality Score become even more significant in light of new changes In a very recent announcement, Google has confirmed that it will no longer display advertisements on the right hand side of its search engine result pages. This may sound a small thing but it could be a rather significant change, in a statement Google confirmed: “We’ve been testing this layout for a long time, so some people might see it on a very small number of commercial queries. We’ll continue to make tweaks, but this is designed for highly commercial queries where the layout is able ... Read more

Here is a nice little campaign we have been helping with recently. The campaign is all about spreading the love in order to get people to celebrate Valentines Day over at Meadowhall in Sheffield. This campaign is a nice touchy feely one as most Valentines campaigns are. It involved a strong media partnership with a radio station and a live stunt that took place over Valentines weekend.

The last couple of months have been rather choppy for children’s tech brand VTECH. Two months ago its online app store was hacked and personal data of more than 4.8 million adult customers and 6.3 m children was allegedly stolen causing a major customer outcry. The APP store has been down ever since, until this week, when it sprung back up. The company has apparently upgraded its security in the two months it has been down, but unfortunately in a major PR Fail it also updated its Terms and Conditions and buried a few things in there that have caused ... Read more

I spotted this campaign on Digital Buzz this week from Jaguar at the “Big Boys Toys” expo in New Zealand. The brand attempted to take Virtual Reality Experiences to the next level by tricking the person involved and actually taking the car on the road. It feels more like a prank, than a PR stunt, but I like the way it was executed and let’s face it – it got people to talk about the car and the brand which is the objective of the whole thing.

This is my review of a book called Managing Online Reputation: How to Protect Your Company on Social Media which is a book is written by Charlie Powell and produced by Palgrave Pocket Consultants. I read it over the Christmas holidays whilst watching far too many movies and drinking too much beer, it is one of the first books that has been outreached to me, that genuinely interested me, as I felt the outreach was well targeted because I love online crisis management and cover it quite a lot here on the blog. Charlie Pownall used to be the regional managing director at Burston Marstellar amongst ... Read more