Tag: Public Relations

For those of you that missed my team’s little note last week, I am delighted to announce that my agency, Prohibition, is celebrating a record year for 2012-2013 which has seen us double in size, move to much larger and funkier offices, and appoint a new board director. The year has been extremely busy with a number of new high profile business wins, including Country Baskets the UK’s largest wholesaler of floristry supplies and artificial flowers, and the national market leader in sustainable housing, Keepmoat Homes. Our agency has doubled in size in terms of people and revenue and our ... Read more

PR is somewhat of a new thing for many SEO companies. They’ve shifted to content marketing, content strategy and the like, and because of that, they’re slow on the trigger in terms of really assimilating the skills that experienced PR companies have spent 10,000 hours picking up. Despite the many bouts of negative press many PR companies have received, for every bad egg there are several extremely talented companies out there that do an incredible job of getting pick-up for their clients through big publishers. These companies have much to teach SEO companies transitioning into content marketing, and through a ... Read more

Last week, PR Week revealed its Top 40 Tech PR Agencies in the UK based on revenue. It supplied some interesting statistics and having a closer look at them I felt I could take a different slant on it as I was interested in something else other than revenue. PR Week said: The majority of tech agencies are adjusting to this changing landscape and consequently are experiencing rising fee incomes. The total tech fee income of PRWeek’s latest Top 40 Tech Consultancies sample is up almost 30 per cent on last year So it appears its good news for us ... Read more

I am proud to announce that I will be speaking at the CIPR’s “Share This Live” Social Media Conference 2013.  Last year I wrote a quick blog post on Share This, a book that I recommend all PR professionals should try and read in order to stay up to speed with developments in the industry. The book contained practical advice from 20 experienced practitioners on how to move into digital PR from a number of different perspectives.  After, I had written the article I was then contacted by a friend of mine, Stephen Waddington the editor and one of the ... Read more

I was shocked to receive an email this week from Pearson in Practice about its PR Apprenticeship Scheme, which I have been talking to them about for a while now. You might remember I wrote about this a couple of months back after visiting the Yorkshire apprentices and being very impressed. At Prohibition we have a dedicated internship programme and we work with a number of the local Universities to support our students and give them good quality experience. So I was genuinely interested to see how we could help even younger people that were keen to enter the industry ... Read more

We attended the Yorkshire Business Market yesterday and it was interesting to take a new view on how things in the business and marketing world are changing and have evolved over the last six years. When I started blogging, many years and moons ago, there weren’t many people talking about social media apart from the geeks and bloggers of course. In fact, when my team and I used to pitch way back in 2008 for as we called it then “Word of Mouth Marketing Briefs” we were often doing so non-competitively and this was for a number of global brands. ... Read more

The Leveson Inquiry has once again brought the spotlight onto the world of Journalism. However, the fantasic journalism shouldn’t be tainted with one bad group of nasty journalists. There are still really good journalists out there that need to be backed. We all love a good story and that is what sells papers. I am personally proud to work in the media and am proud of our free press – it could be worse we could have boring newspapers that are censored by our governments and mean nothing. Some of the best stories come from the journalists when they run ... Read more

Last year, you might remember I started a charity pub quiz in the name of a former journalist and friend of mine called Nigel Scott who died a while back. The event thankfully was a huge success and great fun. In fact, it was so popular it sold out in just under five days, so this year the CIPR Committee and I have brought it back bigger and better. We have moved it to a new venue in Alea Casino, which means we have increased the amount of tickets from 100–180 people and the quiz master will be  James Wilson ... Read more

Adrian Bridgwater, a freelance journalist and social media friend of mine tweeted yesterday that he was going to share his golden rules of public relations. I have been following Adrian for a while now and I find his insights, from the other side of the fence, interesting. So I started to read some of these rules and although most were obvious and clear common sense I could tell that PR professionals had broken a lot of them pretty regularly. So if you if you want to avoid any mishaps when approaching journalists with a story here are his golden rules ... Read more

An article in The Economist last week claimed that public relations companies are feeling much better about things and doing far better financially. The article stated: “According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, ... Read more