Blog

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.

Last week, I finally concluded my latest thought series of UK seminars in Birmingham after starting way back in January. These seminars were helping to share my thoughts and educate a few marketers and content creators along the way about the latest trends I have noticed emerging. Although they are hugely tiring to write from scratch, I do like to get out and meet people and stay on top of the latest developments in social, and in the last twelve months there have been some fascinating bits and pieces going on. So rather than coming out and speaking to everyone ... Read more

I love to read and I am always interested to read blogs that have become books and this example is no different. The Secret Barrister was the Independent Blog of the Year in 2017 and I managed to read it over a couple of weeks whilst out in Spain last month and I found it both shocking and infuriating at the same time. The book is brilliantly written by a barrister who is doing the job that they love but finding it hugely frustrating and saddening. He goes into lots of detail about what is great, and more interestingly, what ... Read more

Social media listening is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about an individual, product or brand on the Internet, brands, agencies and consultants like myself have been using it since the birth of Radian6 way back in 2006 a whopping 13 years ago. The truth is social media conversations produce unstructured data, and social listening programmes help sieve through this to gain marketers insight into opinions and feedback and it makes it far cheaper than the good old days of brand trackers on the high streets holding clipboards. But the real opportunity for social media listening ... Read more