Blog

I was recently running an advanced social media training session with a number of senior female academics and when the subject of LinkedIn was brought up. I started discussing how it was useful to raise your profile in the higher education sector and I was met by a series of hesitant glances. LinkedIn being used like Tinder and Bumble I wondered what was wrong and the academics told me they don’t use LinkedIn for one main reason; because men approach them on it all of the time. Now, I may not be up to date with the latest online dating ... Read more

As the UK closes its third week of the Coronavirus crisis, I am still getting used to the short commute downstairs in the morning, and what-feels-like hundreds of video calls each day. But what does this unprecedented state of limbo mean for brands? Plough on regardless or pause everything? The truth is there is no one-size-fits-all, and over the last few weeks, we’ve been busy advising our valuable clients on the best strategies to navigate these choppy waters. Get it right, and what you do now could define your brand for the next 10 years. To help us all in ... Read more

One of the biggest trends I’ve seen in the last 12-18 months has been a considerable rise in the use of dark social. Dark social sounds like a scary secret place on the internet but it is a massive opportunity for marketers, and many people get confused with what dark social is. So in this post, I thought I would share my thoughts on why I believe dark social is worth considering during 2020 and why you should start trying to track it more accurately. So what is dark social? Well, firstly it is not dark posting which is part ... Read more

When discussing your business’ marketing strategy, training your team on the benefits and tactics of social media marketing and their proper usage isn’t a bad idea. Although you may not initially think it, social media as it stands today is one of the largest hubs for business marketing and houses a plethora of fresh business opportunities. Regardless of whether you’re the brains behind an innovative SME or the founder of a large corporate conglomerate,  continually educating yourself and your team on the proper usage of social is critical to securing your position as a forward-thinking brand.   11 reasons for ... Read more

I can’t believe we are already into February but here we are. In the last 30 days, we have been touring the UK giving a number of seminars on the latest emerging Social Media Trends. We have pulled the data for these trends from a huge variety of sources to be able to provide you with a very comprehensive overview. Social Media Seminars However, these seminars are rather lengthy as we tend to look at each social media trend in a lot more detail. However, I know social media marketers are busy making content – so busy in fact, that ... Read more

Those of you that read my blog will know I love a clever PR stunt and this one has caught my eye this week. This great PR stunt was staged by Mumbai Police and FCB Interface who collaborated to teach Mumbai’s reckless car horn honkers a lesson. In this video you can watch how a passive street signal is turned into a Punishing Signal. The aim was to teach the Mumbaikars – how to #HonkResponsibly. I love the fact this is done both amusingly and to get a great result. In other words to reduce noise pollution. Great work team.

2019 was a record year for us at Prohibition and I am delighted to say we won a number of awards for our clever content marketing campaigns from both the CIPR and Prolific North. However, the clever brilliant work tends to be done by my team around various boardroom tables as we get together and come up with new ideas to make creative podcasts, infographics, media stories, gifs and videos. In the last twelve months alone our video team has produced more than 80 videos for 40 different clients from across lots of different sectors. Some of the quality of ... Read more

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