Now that the busy summer season is a distant memory, we thought we’d revisit the list to see what’s changed over the winter months.

North Cornwall chefs still dominate the list, but there have been a few changes to the top 10 with two new entries: Jack Stein from The Seafood Restaurant, and Chris Eden from the Driftwood Hotel. Emily Scott from The Harbour, Port Isaac has seen the biggest gain with a 113% increase of followers.

Emily Scott from The Harbour Port Isaac is the biggest climber.

As well as looking at the chefs here in Cornwall, we have also taken a look at the top tweeting restaurants, which has revealed Fifteen Cornwall as the clear leader.

Here’s who made the top 10:

Chefs

1. Rick Stein 26,686 followers – 13,234 new followers +98%
2. Nathan Outlaw 8,069 followers -  2,140 new followers + 36%
3. Paul Ainsworth 3,671 followers  - 1,375 new followers + 60%
4. Adrian Oliver 1,121 followers – 334 new followers + 42%
5. Emily Scott 1,029 followers – 545 new followers + 113%
6. Jack Stein 1,023 followers – New entry
7.  Nick Barclay 936 followers – 221 followers + 31%
8. Paul Ripley 901 followers – 459 new followers + 103%
9. Prosenjit Sanjay Kumar 752 followers – 173 new followers + 30%
10. Chris Eden 742 followers – New entry

Follower numbers are a pretty crude measurement of influence on Twitter, so websites such as Klout and Peerindex measure influence, taking into account mentions, retweets and conversations. Here’s our Klout list of Cornwall’s most influential chefs:

Klout Cornish chef power list

Restaurants

1. Fifteen Cornwall 7,980 followers
2. The Seafood Restaurant 3,400 followers
3. Seafood and Grill 969 followers
4. Porthminster Beach Cafe 697 followers
5. Sam’s on the Beach 553 followers
6. The New Yard 537 followers
7. Rojano’s in the Square 526 followers
8. Saffron Restaurant 480 followers
9. The Cornish Arms 461 followers
10. Paul Ainsworth at Number 6 433 followers

If you know of any other Cornish chefs or restaurants with good social media presence, please let us know be leaving a comment below.

In particular, a job in the PR and journalism industry relies on accurate writing and attention to detail.

When shortlisting applicants for interview, the employer’s only means of assessing you is from your covering letter and CV. It is very important to get them right and not make any avoidable mistakes which could count against you.

Here are a few pointers for potential applicants to consider:

• Keep your font size and type consistent.
• Use grammar correctly and don’t use semicolons if you don’t know where to put them. Bristol University’s website has a good section on grammar tips and exercises.
• Lay out your covering letter correctly and if you don’t know how to do this, then find out.
• Dear Sir/Madam = Yours faithfully (with a small f).
  Dear Bob/Mr Smith = Yours sincerely (with a small s).
• Names always begin with a capital letter; it looks sloppy if a letter begins “Dear ellie, I am interested in a work placement at barefoot media….”.
• Do some research. You only need to look at the homepage of our website to see that “Barefoot Media” is not “Barefootmedia” or “Bare Foot media”.
• There is no excuse for poor spelling.
• Ensure that your covering letter answers anything that has been specifically requested, e.g. why you feel you are suitable for the role or what relevant experience you have.
• A good CV should be clearly laid out and succinctly contain the following: personal information, education and qualifications, work experience, skills, achievements, interests and references.
• Proof read your application. Get a friend, your mum or anyone else to proof read it, and then proof read it again.

We are currently looking for a third year PR or Marketing student to carry out a 40 week internship, beginning in June/July. Closing date for applications is 30th March and a job description can be found on our website.

I’m ridiculously proud of what we’ve achieved in that time. From winning awards, rebranding the company, creating a unique press centre for journalists, and working on some fantastic campaigns.

However, situations change, and as sad as I am to be leaving Cornwall after five and a half years, I’m also really excited about the opportunities which lie closer to my hometown of Hastings.

Before I go, I wanted to take two seconds to thank a few people who have made my first role in communications so enjoyable.

Team Barefoot at the CIPR Pride awards in October.

I’ve been really fortunate to be afforded a large amount of freedom and responsibility in my time at Barefoot, but even luckier to have been able to spend it working with fantastic clients.

Special mentions go to those I’ve worked closest with: Sam at Amélies at the Smokehouse; Paul & Emma Ainsworth and their fantastic team in Padstow; Emily and Jason at The Harbour; Mark and Trev; Charlie; and the entire team at Watergate Bay.

There’ s a fantastic business community in Kernow. Everybody I’ve met has been extremely welcoming but I particularly want to thank those who have supported me as partners: Andy from UCP, Ryan and Tim from Liminal, Mark & the team at Redfuse,  and Anna at Mailaway. And also to Mark and Rachel Picken who told me about the role in the first place.

On a personal level, thanks to Kit and Katy who put up with me in St Austell for five months, Emily Smith for all her support, the Small Sofa boys, and current housemates Jack and Lotti.

I’d like to thank all the journalists, bloggers, radio stations, and television people without who I wouldn’t have a job and who have made it so interesting.

Whoever takes my role (applications open til Sunday) will join a small but perfectly formed team. Caragh has rejuvenated and reenergised Barefoot since her arrival six months ago. She has a very exciting future ahead of her and I can’t recommend her highly enough.

And then there’s Jim. Despite spending over 4,000 hours in his company, he’s never complained about my singing or preference for obscure electro.

He is a fantastic PR with a great eye for detail, who has invested a ridiculous amount of time and patience with helping me become a better PR as well as offering me advice on how to fix my car!

And to the rest of the Michell family: Ellie, Evie and Sophie – thank you for welcoming me into your home and for letting me eat all your cake and biscuits.

If you would like to keep in touch and follow my quest to further my career in London, you can follow me on Twitter or email me at sam_lynas@hotmail.com.

Cornwall has given me the best five years of my life and I look forward to returning in the future.

In PR terms, there have been too many occasions over the last couple of years when great businesses have approached us looking to drive traffic to their website, when the website itself is far from at its best.

Hopefully by thinking about six of the below points at the start of a website project, everybody will benefit.

How can I make changes and how much will it cost?
A website is never finished. Your business is always evolving and your website needs to be built to allow you to reflect these changes. On many occasions I have seen businesses lured in by a low cost website only to pay through the nose to make simple text and image changes once it is handed over. For simpler brochure websites, I would advocate the use of an open source content management system (CMS) such as WordPress or Concrete 5. Not only are these free to use, they are all simple to update, potentially saving you hundreds of pounds.

How will it look on mobile devices?
Smartphones and tablets (iPads being the most popular) now account for over 40% of internet connections. With this set to grow massively in the next few years, if you don’t optimise your website for mobile devices, in effect you’re alienating a large percentage of potential visitors from your website. This doesn’t mean building a parallel mobile version of your website (there are strong arguments against their effectivness), but you should ask your developer to show you websites they have built in the past on mobile and see how easy they are to use.

How will I know it’s working?
If you’re going to invest a significant amount of money in your website, you will want to know the level of results it’s delivering. Why are some pages more successful than others? Which sites are sending more traffic to your website? Is that expensive pay per click campaign delivering a good return on investment? Google Analytics is a free system that is really simple to use but can also give you a wealth of data about how your website is performing, which can help you to make improvements.

How will it be optimised for search engines?
Metadata, keywords, and tags may seem alien to you, but they should be bread and butter to your web developer. Don’t be afraid to ask what they are going to do to make your website more visible to search engines. After all, if you’re not on the first page of results for key phrases you want to be associated with, research has shown that you’ll only be visited by a tiny percentage of potential customers.

Why aren’t there examples of work on your website?
Word of mouth and customer endorsements are still two of the best ways of buying any product, and websites are no different. Ask to be put in touch with recent customers and view examples of their work online.

Who is going to provide the content?
A website can be optimised to the nines for search engines, and be perfectly built, but if the content is no good then people aren’t going to be interested and you won’t achieve your goals. If you have to provide photography and copywriting then make sure you budget for it. Top photography offers a fantastic return on investment – allow £450 to £600 for a one day shoot with a professional. Creating engaging copy which reflects the positive aspects of your business is also one of the most important and yet overlooked facets of your website. If you are going to write it yourself, make sure you proof it thoroughly for spelling and grammatical errors. As this BBC article from the Spring states, a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.

Working alongside Pixel Rain, we produced the following video which depicts how they got on.

24 hours since launching, the video has been seen over 150 times –  equivalent to 10 hours total viewing time. Their twitter account @WeAreGrumpies has also benefitted, reaching over 7,500 people.

Click here to find out more about Grumpies range of Christmas products, and here to find your nearest outlet.

And if you are interested in how your business could integrate video into your marketing, give Jim a call on 01208 895089.

So when there’s a chance to see them all under one roof, we jump at the opportunity, as we did at the food festival held on Lemon Quay in Truro in September.

As well as catching up with some of the businesses we work with, it also gave us a chance to sample the sheer range of brilliant produce on offer, from cheese and chutneys, oils and olives, to pies and pasties.

Unbeknownst to us, Pixel Rain were filming on the day and after it had been cut, edited and published, this video really caught our eye as it perfectly captured the hustle and bustle, creativity, and sense of fun on show throughout the weekend.

We’ve tried to pick out as many of the foodies featured as we possibly can, but please feel free to give us a shout if we’ve missed any:

Grumpies of Cornwall

Treleavens Luxury Cornish Ice Cream

Kernow Sausage Company

Cornish Orchards

Origin Coffee

Cornish Soup Company

Cornish Duck Company

Nicky Grant

Cornish Food Box Company

Nathan Outlaw

And if you also enjoyed the Cornwall Food & Drink Festival then it’s more than likely that you’ll want to attend the Falmouth Christmas Festival, taking place from the 15th – 18th December and featuring demonstrations from Rick Stein, Annie Sibert of My Fish Kitchen, and Tom Scade of The Mariner’s, Rock. Our client, Grumpies of Cornwall will also be on hand in their final public appearance of the year, selling their incredible range of Christmas pies.

So if you see us wandering around, feel free to say hi. Just make sure we’ve stopped eating first.

All of the electricity we use in the office will now be generated by the 16 solar panels, which can produce up to 3,500 kWh per year. In the past year our office used 3,200 kWh of energy.

We now have 4 kWp solar panels installed at Barefoot Media.

Over 25 years the solar panels will save 40 tonnes of CO2 emissions and greatly decrease our carbon footprint.

The solar panels were installed by Penzance based renewable energy installation company Plug into the Sun.

If you were unable to attend the event you can view our presentation here for some useful tips on how to get the most out of your attendance at food and drink events.

The St. Wenn-based company scooped two gold awards at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) PRide Awards for the West of England region.

At the ceremony in Bristol, the company was awarded top honours in the categories ‘Best Website or Microsite’ and ‘Best Use of Photography or Design’. Account executive Sam Lynas was shortlisted in the Outstanding Young Communicator category.

From left to right: Barefoot Media's Sam Lynas; managing partner of Barefoot Media, Jim Michell; Mark Grice of Redfuse Internet; and Ryan McFarlane of Liminal Design with a CIPR PRide gold award for Best Website.

Receiving the trophies at the black tie awards, Jim Michell, managing partner of Barefoot Media, said: “We put great content at the heart of all our PR campaigns, and photography is a key element in getting journalists and customers interested in clients’ news and activities.

“It’s something that we have found adds a really powerful dimension to PR campaigns and it’s great to see that our work on Veuve Clicquot Polo on the Beach has been recognised by the judges.”

The agency, which specialises in content-led PR and digital marketing, has handled the media relations and press promotion for the award-winning Veuve Clicquot Polo on the Beach for the past five years as part of their ongoing work with The Hotel & Extreme Academy, Watergate Bay.

It is their second award for the event, which won the category of ‘Best Campaign £10k and Under’ at last year’s awards.

Of the use of photography, the CIPR judges said: “This entry demonstrated excellent use of stunning photography – which depicted the meaning and essence of polo on the beach. Of the 53 pieces of local and national print media coverage (which included Metro, The Guardian and the Sunday Mirror), 79% of coverage (42 pieces) included photography.

“The event attracted a record 3,500 spectators. Judges were impressed with the campaign execution and it lived up to ‘a picture speaks a 1,000 words’.”

Their own website – www.barefootmedia.co.uk – which won the Best Website Award, was designed by Liminal Design of Redruth, Cornwall and developed by Redfuse Internet of Pool.

The CIPR judges said: “Barefoot Media commissioned a new brand identity and website which would accurately reflect the range of services that they offer and provided tangible benefits to journalists and clients.

“The website is fresh and looks professional. The judges were particularly impressed with the Press Centre, and all the case studies and releases were topical, interesting and current.”

Judged by leading figures from within the industry, the PRide awards recognise the best PR work carried out across the UK’s regions and nations over the past year.

For more information, visit www.barefootmedia.co.uk.

ENDS

Images
High resolution images to illustrate this press release can be downloaded from our Image Library.

Notes to editors
Barefoot Media is a PR, digital marketing and content creation company based in Cornwall. Working with clients including Cornish food and drink producers, tourism businesses and beach sports events, Barefoot have run PR campaigns for award-winning events, copywritten websites, delivered social media training and much more.

Everyone, professional and amateur bakers alike, had made a huge effort to produce some beautiful cakes. As we were on the beach, this month’s theme was ice cream, which gave us a huge array of flavours to play with, and featured ‘Raspberry Ripple’, ‘Neapolitan’, ‘Mint Choc Chip’, ‘Chunky Monkey’, ‘Cookies & Cream’ and ‘Rocky Road’. Three cakes were actually made with ice cream and Katie made some gorgeous mini ice cream cone cakes, complete with sprinkles and flakes.

Emily's white chocolate and raspberry ice cream cake

Emily (of Treleavens Ice Cream) made a stunning white chocolate and raspberry ice cream cake. With a little magic, and a small portable freezer, she had managed to transport it to Watergate Bay without it melting. How she carried it with one hand while pushing a buggy I will never know. We then discovered that Stuart Pate (Executive Pastry Chef at Rick Stein‘s The Seafood Restaurant) had used Emily’s Treleavens Ice Cream in his breathtaking Baked Alaska. Huge thanks to Stu for bringing us this delicious cake, despite having to do a cooking demo and make a wedding cake that day. It tasted even better than it looked (which is fairly tricky).

Stuart Pate's Baked Alaska

Twitter had been a huge part in making this event happen and it was great to get @fishwifemark2, @jjgabour and @saffronbunny together in ‘real life’. @saffronbunny (aka Rachel) brought with her the most amazing supersize chocolate fudge sundae (in an enormous glass vase) – definitely the centrepiece of the table. A long handled spoon was essential, and it was absolutely delicious – layers of sponge, pears poached in red wine, whipped cream and brownies. Read the bunny’s blog here.

Wendy's Hedgehog Ice Cream Cake with Rachel's Chocolate Fudge Sundae in the background

It was lovely to meet Wendy Mitchell (from the fabulously named Big Buns Cake Co) and to taste the cake she created especially for the event. It was based on the famous Chapel Porth Hedgehog Ice Cream and can only be described as ‘Vanilla Hedgehog Cake with Clotted Cream and Toasted Heather Honey Hazelnuts’. Wow.

The Beach Hut was a fantastic venue with stunning views of the surf as well as a spacious, warm and comfortable place to chat and eat cake. Thank you to Laura (manager) and her staff for looking after us so well. Will Ashworth (MD for The Hotel & Extreme Academy, Watergate Bay) rose to the challenge and produced a deliciously nutty ‘Chunky Monkey’ cake.

Will's Chunky Monkey cake

We were very pleased to see various members of staff pop down from The Hotel to The Beach Hut to help us try out all the cakes. When we thought we couldn’t possibly eat any more cake, as if by magic, the hungry Extreme Academy surf instructors arrived. I was advised by Laura that The Beach Hut‘s kitchen features a special boiler that turns waste food into heat for the kitchens so nothing went to waste, although I’m not sure whether it was the boiler or the kitchen staff that polished off the last few portions!

Sam's Raspberry Ripple Cake and Katie's Mini Ice Cream Cones

Thank you to everyone for getting involved with such a fun event. Special thanks to Judi Blakeburn and Alison Payne at Watergate for making it happen and to Jim Michell (Barefoot Media) for the photograpy.

• Rachel Wilson-Couch (Saffron Bunny) – Enormous chocolate fudge sundae with pears in red wine
• Emily Lofthouse (Treleavens Ice Cream) – White Chocolate and Raspberry Ice Cream Cake
• Jessica Milln – Raspberry Ripple Cake
• Brigitte Holman – Carrot Cake
• Sam Lynas (Barefoot Media) – Raspberry Ripple Cake
• Caragh O’Donnell (Barefoot Media) – Chocolate Marble Cake
• Kirstie Foote – Cookies and Cream Cake
• Vicki Harvey – Ice Cream Swirl
• Richenda Farrelly – Mint Choc Chip Cake
• Stuart Pate (The Seafood Restaurant) – Baked Alaska
• Katie Ashworth – Mini Ice Cream Cones
• Will Ashworth (The Hotel & Extreme Academy, Watergate Bay) – Chunky Monkey Cake
• Wendy Mitchell (Big Buns Cake Co) – Vanilla Hedgehog Cake
• Molly Craig – Rocky Road Chocolate Cake
• Ellie Michell, organiser (Barefoot Media) – Neapolitan Cake

Due to popular demand, our next event will be held during an evening in late November.