Tag: Social Media

So this week Facebook launched a special portal called Explore London 2012 to give users more direct access to the athletes of the games. It has been set up to enable the athletes to speak to the fans easier – this will allow entrants to share updates and images from the games. Something which should be applauded – anything that opens up access to any huge event is brilliant in my opinion. According to Techcrunch the project has been in development for more than 18 months. However, it appears the Olympic Committee has taken a view that it can’t stop ... Read more

Last week I joined a panel debate at the University of York for its Careers Service in front of several hundred students to discuss jobs in the creative sector. It was a fascinating debate with people from across the country spanning several different specialisms. There were representatives from consumer insight , advertising, PR and social media marketing companies. There were people from Ogilvy, The Labour Party and Aviva and it made for an interesting discussion. I went with my Prohibition hat on to explain what students can do for jobs in this sector and in this region. I think we ... Read more

This week we have just been putting the finishing touches to this new Facebook application called The Messy Garden which we have had built for a client. The client has issued some academic research on sustainable gardens and the benefits of having a messy section in your garden to attract bees and other insects. The brief for this campaign was to make sustainable gardening more accessible and to reach out to a new demographic that doesn’t normally think about gardening. The team are doing a great job on the usual traditional media relations campaign which includes us showcasing a garden ... Read more

The PR stunt of the week, so far OK so it’s only Monday, has to go to Alton Towers. The reason is the team there have managed to get national coverage on the fact the new ride “Nemesis Sub-Terra” ride has been classed for the over 12s by the British Board of Film and Classification. As soon as I read that I thought – genius move. This was obviously carefully thought through to make it sound very, very scary and even the board admitted they had never classified a ride before. So that get’s a big tick from me as ... Read more

I have just logged into my Facebook pages today and noticed something rather interesting. Facebook seems to have rolled out a new feature that allows you to invite your Facebook friends to your Facebook page. This takes me back a few years when they used to do that with Facebook groups but I beleive they removed it due to the amount of spamming that was happening because of the feature. The inability to invite people to pages is one of the reasons there are so many companies out there using Facebook wrongly and adding friends to a standard Facebook profiles. ... Read more

This week I have been doing quite a bit of analysis and research into bloggers and online influencers. This has become part of my day job reading, researching and engaging and I am often asked by other PR professionals to give recommendations on some of the tools that I use. So I thought a quick post on a few might help. To make this test fair I have used a local theme park that my family and I like to visit called Flamingo Land as I thought it would be a bit more fun that the usual corporate stuff. 1. ... Read more

This is a guest post written by good friend and colleague Zubair, you can follow him on Twitter @souljaof4tune and read his blog here. After a rather interesting discussion with Chris about some really good PR and social media blogs out there and the realisation that no one has a made a list of the very best (we all love a good list – don’t we?) in a long time. I decided to create this, the top 25 UK PR and social media blogs. Using the Ad Age Power 150, a list of the top English language marketing blogs. I ... Read more

Facebook has today announced its new edit feature which allows users and page administrators to edit their statuses after they have been posted. According to the latest research 94% of all Facebook users have actually deleted posts due to typos and poor mistakes in Facebook updates because there was previously no edit function. The recent launch of Google+ has forced the more established social network to raise its game by releasing a whole new set of features. I bet you have been reading this and thinking brilliant, thanks Chris that is really useful. Well sorry it’s not true but the ... Read more

The video below reminds me of the Will it Blend campaign where they did something rather extreme to a gadget to show how impressive it is. In the case of Will it Blend they placed an iPad into a blender and blended into dust which made for a clever campaign that went viral on YouTube and moved the brand from a lowly position to a top ten blender brand. It also opened up a whole new market as men watched the video and wanted the best blender on the planet. So with that in mind the video below is from ... Read more

I had to share this video as I spotted this campaign on the news this morning and I think it is a brilliant campaign from the British Heart Foundation that has combined humour with a serious issue. Many people in the UK don’t know how to give CPR when someone is in cardiac arrest and the idea of doing it to the music of Staying Alive is just genius as it makes memorable. If it saves one person’s life it will be a campaign worth doing and I think it has been executed beautifully. They have gone all out on ... Read more