Year: 2017

Are you fed up of fake engagement on Facebook? These days it’s pretty hard to log on to your Facebook without seeing ‘tag that work colleague you couldn’t survive without’ or ‘like if you’re hungover this morning’, however, thankfully that’s about to change. The commonly held belief behind ‘engagement bait’ is that if you want to secure wider visibility for your brand page you should encourage fan interactions, such as shares and likes. If we are all honest shares are the panacea for any social media marketer, mainly because they receive the most points in Facebook’s algorithm. One share is ... Read more

Mark Zuckerberg’s plight for worldwide domination was coming along nicely. In fact, it seemed all too easy, that was until Snapchat. When Spiegal declined a decent offer of $3 billion back in 2013 from Mark Zuckerburg, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, wasn’t just going to sit back and twiddle his thumbs. I wrote a post back in June about why Facebook stories were failing in my opinion. First came Instagram stories, then Facebook and even Whatsapp. Whilst arguably Instagram stories caused a wave, the others somewhat fell flat. So what could Mr Zuckerberg do next? Give up? Let ... Read more

I have noticed a change in attitude over recent years of students that have picked PR or journalism degrees. For those that don’t know the PR degree (of which I sometimes lecture for) asks their students to get valuable work experience to get real work for their portfolios. This becomes an intrinsic part of their degree and as the years go by the student’s portfolio gets better and better.  It’s actually the reason I got my first PR job in London against 400 other applicants – the fact I had real-life PR experience won me the job. Some students are ... Read more

Back in 2015 I wrote an article about my favourite walking blogs in the UK, the post received more than 40 comments and still proves to be very popular today. However, many of the original bloggers have now put up their boots and since stopped working their magic online. We can’t all walk forever I suppose. So I thought it would be good to do a renewed version for 2017 to help give people some further ideas for decent walks around the country for everyone from the beginner to the more experienced trekker. My methodology for calculating this list this ... Read more

Two weeks ago I returned from Cuba with my family, it was an eye-opening trip and I learnt a lot about a country that I knew very little about other than the critical role it almost played in World War Three and the revolution with Fidel Castro. The last week’s events have really saddened me as Hurricane Irma has torn through the country with devastating effects. I haven’t stopped thanking my lucky stars we left the country when we did. The people who got off our plane must have been evacuated by Thomas Cook although judging by its lacklustre PR response ... Read more

Here is a little house mix I put together on my CDJs when I had a spare hour yesterday. These are my favourite tunes that are available at the moment, I have been collecting these for the last 30 days or so. You can download the mix if you want to from my Sound Cloud account.  

I speak a lot to student and marketers alike about social media crisis management as I believe it can have a huge impact on a brand’s reputation and share price if you get it wrong. Even today I am amazed at how many brands just pass the social media content to the most junior member of the team. Everything is fine and dandy until the shit hits the fan and things start to unravel – this is usually when the PR team are called in and start to earn their wages and all of a sudden they start getting listened ... Read more

With campaigns becoming increasingly more integrated and digital, I like to stay abreast of what has been happening in the creative sector. I mean it can’t hurt to be aware of the finest campaigns and the best ideas and executions can it? I like to use them as inspiration for our next campaign at Prohibition although often they are in completely different sectors but it can help you whilst you are scratching your heads in a brainstorm. As I write this I can’t believe it’s already the 19th July, so as we are easily half way through the year. What ... Read more

On the first day, Evan Spiegal created Snapchat. On the second day, Mark Zuckerberg pioneered a huge infiltration of clone after clone of the Snapchat stories feature, with every branch of the Facebook family tree miraculously adding an almost identical version of the mobile app’s features to its platforms. This copycat movement led firstly by Instagram and shortly after followed by Facebook and WhatsApp (yeah, I’d forgotten about WhatsApp stories already as well). With every social platform copying the feature, the social media marketing world watched with interest. The situation becoming such a joke, that stories instigated a meme coined ... Read more

All of us working in social media and digital have noticed the huge increase in social video and it seems the advertising budgets have shifted towards video more than anything else. The increasing amount of short video clips, TV programmes and films people watch on mobiles helped UK internet advertising grow at its fastest rate for nine years, crossing the £10 billion threshold for the first time. The amount UK companies spent on internet advertising rose 17.3pc¹ year-on-year to £10.3bn in 2016, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau UK / PwC Digital Adspend report. Mobile video ads were the fastest-growing ... Read more