Tag: News

Fake news has been grabbing the headlines a lot recently but is it really that new to us in the PR industry? Sure, it’s a clever way to make money from content that appears to have been exploited but brands have been pushing sponsored content and (or advertorials as we call them in the business) since well before I started my PR career back in (coughs quietly) 1998. We just never coined the phrase Fake News – we simply said “Sponsored Page” or “Advertisement Feature” as that was far more civilised but it amounted to the very same thing, content ... Read more

The last couple of months have been rather choppy for children’s tech brand VTECH. Two months ago its online app store was hacked and personal data of more than 4.8 million adult customers and 6.3 m children was allegedly stolen causing a major customer outcry. The APP store has been down ever since, until this week, when it sprung back up. The company has apparently upgraded its security in the two months it has been down, but unfortunately in a major PR Fail it also updated its Terms and Conditions and buried a few things in there that have caused ... Read more

Yesterday I jumped on a plane and headed across to Ireland after being personally invited to Growth Hack Talks by a friend of mine, Ben Cotton. He managed to convince me to get off my backside, jump on  a plane and go and listen to a few other clever marketing people speak for once. The reason I decided to go was because it was on a subject, which had caught my eye, and which is still relatively new to us here in the UK. If you want to be successful in the marketing space you have to keep looking out ... Read more

I have been busy this week at Prohibition HQ, reading this and that, but something that really stood out to me was the interesting annual study on Social Journalism which is conducted each year by Cision and Canterbury Christ Church University. Each year the results chart the changing ways journalists and media professionals use social media for their work and in their communication with us, the good old PR professionals. The report isn’t commissioned just in this country as it gathers data from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, Sweden and Australia. So it’s very interesting to check out, as ... Read more

Over the last couple of months I have been really busy giving my usual lectures to my lovely PR and Journalism students at Leeds Beckett University and one of the presentations I have crafted is on the Future of Social Media listening which covers the issues and different elements modern PR practitioners need to consider when listening and identifying important issues online. I won’t bore you with the full details but I cover a wide variety of elements in the seminar including the beautiful graphical Enterprise solutions right down to the free monitoring tools and let’s face it no free ... Read more

I read some interest thoughts the other day, extensive research carried out by business intelligence tool L2 revealed that an increasing amount of brands are migrating from Facebook and focusing their attention on the use of Instagram. This surge in migrant users is not limited to brands; Instagram has grown from 100-300 million active users in only the last two years and I myself have noticed it really taking off for some of the clients we work with.  You can follow me on Instagram here. These new users of the photo-sharing app are apparently young, impressionable, and tech savvy. Studies ... Read more

Celebrity judge and pop music sensation Will.I.Am (although I am not a huge fan of his voice) raised the question of how BBC talent show, “The Voice” need to make the winners into winners. With its latest series airing last Saturday, new celebrity judge Rita Ora managed to bring in more than eight million viewers- the largest audience for the opening episode of any series so far, which is a good start but why are people tuning in? Is it for the acts or is it simply for the coaches themselves? It all started in 2012, “The Voice” is now ... Read more

The CEO of Air Asia and owner of QPR Tony Fernandes faced his biggest challenge last month when an Airasia flight was sadly reported missing. On December 28th at 7:24 hours Airasia reported the QZ8501 flight from Surabaya to Singapore had lost contact. Updates were shared with the media throughout the day and just two days later unfortunately it was reported that the aircraft had crashed over the Java Sea and some debris had already been found. With more than a hundred passengers and crew on board Fernandes was forced into the front seat as Indonesia was seen to depend ... Read more

Earlier this week it was announced that the CIPR is to cease it’s arrangement with PR Week after December 2014. PR week to many has been many things to many people, from a mild irritant getting leaks on the industry, to a useful gauge of the PR sector but it’s true it kind of lost its way about 18 months ago. The media landscape has changed and the industry has had to also but I still felt an industry voice was needed. I sit on the CIPR committee in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire and have been involved for several years on ... Read more

In September, the PRCA launched a new report into digital trends in the PR industry. Put together after a YouGov study of 228 agency and in-house PR professionals across a wide range of sectors, the results are, for me, both encouraging and worrying. As a top line summary, there are five key points to consider. Digital remains the big growth area in PR. This really should come as a surprise to no-one. I hope. Agency and in-house skill sets continue to grow, which makes common sense considering the growth in digital and practitioners having no choice but to skill up. ... Read more