Year: 2019

It amazes me that there are clients out there in the big wide world in 2019 that still want to buy Facebook followers. Those working in social media marketing know that followers are nothing but a vanity metric. I go through the motions advising clients this and they nod their heads in agreement, but sometimes they stop me and simply say they have to grow the page anyway.  I can see the predicament and I suppose they do still have a point. The main reason is usually that they want these new Facebook numbers just to show that their brand ... Read more

I’m going to start this post by saying that I really do love Twitter, I’ve been on Twitter since February 2008. In fact, when I started tweeting all that time ago there were only about 50 people on Twitter from the UK, none of which really knew how to use it, including several people I still follow today. Twitter is brilliant and is still my platform of choice – all that said it really isn’t perfect. An amazing networking tool Twitter is an amazing networking tool that connects people with others, that previously you could never think you could connect ... Read more

Last week, my little old PR agency Prohibition was lucky enough to scoop eight awards at the CIPR Pride Awards Yorkshire & Lincolnshire. To win a record-breaking eight industry awards with your peers and several agencies that you respect in attendance was a truly amazing experience and I want to say a huge thank you to all of my team who really do work hard and do the nitty-gritty. PR Agency Awards We won outstanding PR consultancy 2019-20 which is the big one and we won Best use of social media, we won the Best-integrated PR campaign and we even ... Read more

I’ve just returned from a lovely family holiday in the Lakes last week and I got back to some brilliant news. The North’s top PR Agencies While I was away I was notified, by one of our team, that the Prolific North top 50 PR agencies had been revealed and we had been included in it again and better still moved up the table. This caused me to “Whoop Whoop” – you have to celebrate these things. Now I know this isn’t going to go on forever. We’ve been lucky enough to make the list for the last five years ... Read more

This little infographic caught my eye today. If you ignore the terrible music and watch it – it is a great way to illustrate the growth and the decline of various social channels over the last 16 years – including Bebo and MySpace. It has been measured by monthly active users worldwide. Video hosting services like YouTube or Vimeo, as well as content/community sites like Reddit are not included but despite it being slightly too long it is very interesting to watch the quarters and years pass by. I had never heard of qzone so that was a first. See ... Read more

According to a recent report in the UK, 18% of 8-19-year-olds said they have removed certain social apps from their mobile devices as a result of negativity. Although the full report from Real World Insight is both interesting and slightly worrying at the same time it does pose some interesting questions for us parents. I am going to be honest, in the last month I have really started to take an extra interest in social media usage in the UK by young people. As I have worked in this industry since it started back in the early 2000s I have ... Read more

  I thought this video was interesting today, this is the CIPR interviewing Danske Bank’s Vicky Davies and she speaks very eloquently on the fact that reputation is now everything in business. I find this clip quite refreshing as most companies see us PR people as purely press release machines. It’s so good to see a senior board member believing in what PR can help to achieve and maintain – a much better reputation. Often the only time a marketer realises the importance of communications is when the proverbial hits the fan and you need a PR team to deal ... Read more

I have had a busy few months working with a number of different Universities sorting various social media training courses and delivering new content marketing strategies for them. One of the things that is close to my heart is the creation of brand ambassadors no matter what industry you are in whether that is Education or FMCG. So I have been delering training courses to a number of academics around the country to show them how to get the most from social media marketing and to help them aid their own online profiles. By now, most people know the main ... Read more

We might only be halfway through 2019 and just got rid of the wet weather, but we’ve already seen some brilliant PR stunts. The use of celebrity appearances, pop-up shops and clever social media executions to help try tackle mental health are just some of the interesting examples I have noticed in the last six months. In this post, I take a closer look at my 11 favourite PR campaigns of the year and why I think they have been so effective. Enjoy. 11) Jaguar and Land Rover engineering gender bias campaign. Jaguar Land Rover used to be a client ... Read more

Yesterday I managed to get a bit of time to myself to put together my latest house music mix. I have packed this one with the latest tracks from the last couple of months that have really caught my eye. There is a distinct 1990s vibe to it for some reason which wasn’t intentional but it works and should be perfect for the start of the summer giving you something uplifting to listen too. Here is my Soundcloud channel if you like house music and this has more of my mixes on it from previous months.