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Who doesn’t love a good old tasting surprise PR stunt? And here is the most recent example with our friendly baker Greggs fooling a load of foodies at a food festival. They all think they are trying some local artisan delights when really the food being tasted is available in your local Greggs. A great little stunt and the video is well put together so a big hat tip to the PR team at Greggs for this one. Here’s the campaign bumf: “Who is Gregory and Gregory?” Greggs went undercover to showcase our new summer lunch menu to foodies… but ... Read more

There has been some big news in the last few days in the world of social and I am not talking about Privacy. No I am talking about Flickr, the forgotten social network for images, that was created more than 14 years ago, which was quickly sold to the juggernaut Yahoo – remember them? After that the platform did rather well and was always mentioned as the social photography platform of choice until about six years ago when others started to join the party and to overtake it. It has been bought by a competitor SmugMug – the two platforms ... Read more

I was approached about six months ago by Football Freestyler and TV presenter, John Farnworth to help him with a charity campaign as a favour. John is a truly lovely bloke and he is aiming to add a ninth Guinness World Record to his list by reaching Mount Everest Base Camp – while doing “keep-me-ups”, as part of his next charity challenge which is all for a great cause which is close to his heart. I have known John through a mutual friend for about a year now and his footballing skills really do know no-bounds – in short he ... Read more

When was the last time you came across a marketing campaign without a video element? Can’t remember? No me either, these days it’s a real rarity. With the help of Instagram, the first visually focused social network (well apart from Flickr), video content seems to be taking over. It started with just lovely images, but digital advancements are allowing users to share live, pre-recorded, casual or professional videos with their followers now. Over the last few years, other channels such as Facebook and Twitter have been fighting to stay relevant with the introduction of video elements. Not to mention Microsoft ... Read more

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.