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 pulled together all the UK PR and social media blogs I could find and decided to see what they were all about. The Power 150 list is created through user submissions. I found a lot of the UK blogs on the list seem to be from agencies who’ve submitted there blog and didn’t really offer much of an insight into the industry. This leads me to add that this isn’t a ‘best of’ list but rather a collection of blogs that could one day prove to be rather helpful.

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Fox News had publically criticized the film for supposedly pushing a ‘dangerous liberal agenda’ at kids. Which in my view is ridiculous. I love the fact that the Muppets hold press conferences – we should get these guys back on TV every week because they are brilliant.

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• Dead Dinosaur is ranked 27th most influential marketing blog by Brand Republic

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 question you have to ask yourself is why is it not true? Google+ even has an edit function – see my example up there on the right.

How many times have you posted an update and realised that you have posted something with a typo in it? Probably lots of times if you do a lot of community management for your clients like I do. I know we should be extra vigilant with typos but sometimes they do occur.

So do you think Facebook should launch a new edit feature? What else should they launch that would make your life a whole lot easier?

If you want to add me on Google+ you can do so here.

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So with that in mind the video below is from the G-Form team. In this video they place an iPad into one of their protective cases and attach it to a weather baloon and send it 100,000ft into the air before letting it crash back to earth. There are rumours that this video is fake, this could be true but whichever way you look at it – it is a rather impressive campaign to get us all talking and reporting about what is essentially a protective casing. Add that to the fact that these stunts haven’t cost much and you have a clever campaign in my eyes. I would imagine all they want to do is sell cases.

So what do you think is this real or fake?

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They have gone all out on a viral and social campaign by making sure all of their channels have been presented correctly in the form of a social media hub. They have an iphone app, videos, a blog and you can even buy campaign T-shirts.

Their twitter channel has more than 17,000 followers and asks you to use the campaign hashtag #hardandfast – again very clever messaging.

Then they have gone one step further by asking people to sign their online petition to make emergency life skills as part of the national curriculum. The site states:

“Knowing how to stop bleeding, open an airway or perform CPR should be considered as important as knowing your times tables.

“We want to create a new generation of life savers across the UK by ensuring that emergency life support skills (ELS) are taught in all schools and communities.”

I think more people in the UK should learn general first aid as you never know when you might need it.

Well done to all of those involved.

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• Review: Goldeneye Reloaded has had me gripped

My little boy is four and a half now and is getting more and more into computer games and I seem to be getting a new lease of life on them too. My wife bought me Goldeneye Reloaded for the PS3 which can work with the PS3 Move stick. I have been playing it for most of the Christmas break and I have to say its a cracking game and really good fun. I am not a massive gamer these days but I do have a few that I play and I like to test out some of the latest games that come out but I wouldn’t say I devote my life to them like I used to when I was 20. I used to play the original on the N64 about 14 years ago and back then it was brilliant but it has had a major face lift and all the current actors and actresses have all played their part in making this game brilliant. You get scenes of Daniel Craig calling M (Judy Dench) and some of the action scenes are truly stunning and show you what a classic bond game should now be like.

What I really love about this game is the multi-player function, basically you can play with several players on split screen or over the internet and you are placed on a level with two weapons and you have a number of missions to complete. These usually include shooting your best friend before they shoot you and it is highly amusing albeit quite tense on the nerves because you are constantly searching for the opponent and by the time you have seen them you have been shot.

So I have be training myself to kill quicker and enjoy myself. I am currently stuck on a section in the snow using a sniper rifle which is brilliant. Anyway, I have included a video which showcases the game. For me its the best game I have played in a very long time – so it gets an 9 out of ten and is well worth sticking your hand in your pocket for.

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I should point out that I use Tweetdeck to manage around 15 different profiles and I have done it pretty easily in the past but I am worried that it might be time to switch to another provider.

Have I had problems with it in the past? Well, yes I have, it used to lock out every now and again but what do you expect as it is speaking through an API to Twitter, the site that has fallen over more times than Humpty Dumpty.

But now I have changed my opinion – the latest update is truly awful. We are talking from XP to Windows Vista awful. Truly terrible and here’s why.

1. No spellcheck on tweets anymore
2. Scheduled Tweets go off the screen – see my screen grab. This is really useful if you want to update anything in the final week of the month.
3. The new column system is very clunky and much more difficult
4. They have removed the ability to have Tweetdeck groups entirely – Why?????????
5. The tweet box takes over the entire screen now and also highlights the main account as well as the one you want to use – really annoying
6. Rather than being able to turn notifcations off across the whole lot like before – you have to go into every single column. Nasty!
7. The tweetshrink feature is now gone – again why?????
8. Translate is gone – why????
9. Tweets are labelled with the number of days ago they were sent not the actual time
10. The new home feed includes all of the accounts you have associated with your Tweetdeck profile – why? I don’t want them so I delete them and it still comes back. ARGGGGH!
11. Extra one: Why can’t it auto-shrink the URLs so you can see how long it is?

But don’t just listen to me here is what PC Pro thought:

New TweetDeck had taken it upon itself to make assumptions about my three accounts. The Home feed was taken solely from the team’s @pcpro account, which it had randomly assigned as my default despite there being seemingly no option to set an account as default. I’ve tried deleting all three accounts and adding them in a different order, but it always becomes the default. This also means every time I type a tweet, it assumes I’m sending it from that account, which I rarely do; if you see @pcpro tweet about its hangover on Saturday morning, blame TweetDeck, not me.

The Me feed and Messages column, on the other hand, automatically roll all three accounts into one, with no proper indication of which tweet came from which account. I don’t want to read my editor’s correspondence with our lovely readers mixed in with my own private messages; it’s confusing, a little bit scary and raises the potential for embarrassing blunders. I have three separate accounts for a reason; the decision to bundle them together should be mine, not TweetDeck’s.

Most of this can be fixed by simply deleting all of the default columns and creating new Timelines and Messages columns for each individual account, but to a long-term user like me it seems a perverse way of doing things. Don’t get me started on the way every link and photo now sends you to the browser, or clicking a tweet opens it over that column in the style of the Twitter web interface.

OK so this is a bit of a rant but why make a great product worse – I just don’t understand it at all.

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I have to admit when I opened it and saw it was nine and a half minutes long, I thought there is no way am I watching this, but I actually stuck it out for once and it was fairly impressive.

I have worked for a couple of airlines before and I like to follow what they get up to in the social world as you never know when you will be asked to take part in some blogger outreach programme or some kind of competition. The airlines always tend to have good budgets and seem to have embraced social – mostly because of the whole Jet Blue debacle.

This video seems to be a series of three videos stuck together on three separate elements of the airline’s social media strategy. The first video gives each KLM employee a letter from the alphabet and the real team walk around on screen holding the boards up to respond to tweets to the KLM twitter stream which is just a nice publicity stunt.

The second part/video is monitoring of KLM’s social feeds and the KLM staff reading people’s twitter and social media profiles and then buying the customers small rewards depending on their actual interests stated online. Now this feels a little bit staged to me and a bit for the camera rather than part of a dedicated rewards programme but I like the idea of rewarding your communities and this is what I advise my clients all the time – why should they follow and engage with you when there is another brand down the road that is giving their fans 50% off? 

So I like the idea of directly rewarding people with what they are actually writing about and doing. With that in mind I have always loved KLM and think New York is lovely this time of year – ha ha. However, this responding and rewarding people has, according to the video, managed to reach more than 1,000,000 impressions just on Twitter which isn’t too bad. I like to use monitoring tools to help people that aren’t engaging with us already too and that is probably the next step of KLM’s programme looking for people before they purchase and finding a nice way for the brand to interact with them.

However, my favourite part of this video, is the last of the three videos, in which two dance DJ’s tweet KLM and ask them about flying to the Miami music conference which is a big event in the dance music world. The airline apparently doesn’t travel direct and the KLM team decided to challenge the DJs to get enough dance music fans to sign up to the flight and then they would make it a non-stop journey to Miami.

I really like this because this is getting people to campaign for you rather you campaigning for yourself and we all know that a self fulfilling community is what we are all looking for. The strategy adopted here is not only good customer service but is also a great PR exercise. If I were KLM i would have exposed this one to the maximum and that is what they did. There is a photo-shoot of the DJ’s beat matching on the flight whilst it is in the air and lots of scenes of keen fans getting and dancing on the plane – brilliant. They found out that it was the first time an airline had changed its scheduling following a request from a customer through twitter – again another brilliant news hook. But the PR team went further and went for the (oldest PR trick in the book) Guinness Book of Records for the highest ever dance party – this was a really nice move.

The only downside to this video really is some of it felt a bit too staged and why couldn’t it have been three separate videos and/or all the three but much shorter than almost 10mins.

What do you think? Impressive or too staged?

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Dozens of customers are using the website’s increasing power to try and get free upgrades or refunds despite nothing wrong with their accommodation.

Industry experts have said that a bad rating or review on the popular ratings site can be costly, sometimes to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds in lost bookings.

To be honest I didn’t find this story that shocking because I understand the power of a good and bad review because this is what I help my clients with everyday. Most of what I do in my day job is to get people to test products or services out and tell me and the world what they think of them. Sometimes they are positive and sometimes they aren’t.

I had a product earlier this year that was a great budget product but not a fantastic product when compared to far more expensive gadgets which is perfectly understandable. So when it started to review reasonably but not excellently – I advised the client that we should lead from the front with a flagship product. I saw it better to be outreaching a product which was still very reasonably priced but that also stood up against the competition in terms of features.

In fact, we did this recently with another of our clients Storage Options. The marketing team and us have developed a product which stands out in its class as being the best tablet PC under a certain price point (£300) and consequently, we got the product on The Gadget Show and it won best in class which we are all very proud of. The product in question was the Scroll Excel which has now completely sold out – in fact it sold out so much that I don’t even have my own version  yet but I have played around with the prototypes.

When I went on holiday this year to Cyprus the hotel manager sat us down and asked us how they could make the hotel better. He was asking us what we would do and it was very refreshing to see. He spent more than an hour with us and he reiterated how important a positive review was and said he felt some competitors even left fake negative reviews and this was very hard to combat against.

I think that should be looked at but overall I think the customer review situation has made hotels better places with higher standards and looking to improve their service. How can this be a bad thing?

I am all for power to the customer – we all need to be heard and if a hotel has terrible service then the world should know about it. The hotel then has to act and look to improve itself. I would advise the hotel to then invite the person back to see for themselves free of charge as that would convince me anyway. They should also think of some kind of incentive for giving reviews of the hotel as that could make people think of them more proactively.

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I have been working in online PR for a number of years now and I have definitely noticed that a lot more marketers accept that blogging does have major SEO benefits. Halleluiah – our work is now done then and we can all relax. Hang on a minute…

In this post I am not going to bang on about writing online content just for Google because I covered that last week here. What I mean is blogging and social media campaigns are about creating interesting content that helps create conversations with your core audience no matter who that is. This doesn’t mean it has to be boring keyword packed copy that just ticks the SEO box. It should be the more interesting stuff that helps bring the company to life rather than the duller run of the mill stuff.

For instance, does the CEO of your company or client have a hobby like running, swimming or better yet fencing? If so why not start covering his marathons and add a charity element on the blog and you have got something interesting to talk about that makes your client seem slightly more interesting that the competition. A blog should act like the window into the business – it should bring it to life beautifully and shouldn’t be a chore. It is not your corporate brochure – don’t let the senior team suck your creativity away.

Even if you do have well written content, and you have created a designated conversation calendar for the next three months, you should still be asking yourself a few quick questions.

Here are my fifteen questions to ask yourself:

1. Do you have a content calendar/plan?
2. Have you properly syndicated your corporate blog?
3. Is it plugged into all of your social channels using a service like Twitterfeed? Are their share buttons on each post?
4. Does it have different categories? Do you make sure you use them properly on each post? (Don’t use uncategorised)
5. Does your blog actually allow comments? (I have seen a lot that don’t and that is bad practice)
6. Is your feed managed and optimised through Feedburner?
7. Does it have a search facility? Or an archives section so people can quickly find your content?
8. Does it have an about page?
9. Does it name the writers and explain who they are?
10. Is it easy to subscribe? By email for instance.
11. Have you actually identified the influencers in the blogosphere and have you commented on their sites?
12. Have you optimised your content for SEO? Do you use the All in one SEO Plugin for instance.
13. Do you share your articles on article sites such as Ezine articles?
14. Do you actually track all of your content using an analytics package? What is your favourite post for instance?
15. Have you added the blog onto other materials business cards, brochures and news releases?

Here’s a useful post from Kris de Leon on Social Media Today, in it he covers how to increase comments to your blogs and he makes some good points including this one:

Take the time to read other blogs that are related to your niche. This will give you a better understanding of what’s going on in your niche, and better enable you to provide more value to your audience. If you happen to read an amazing article or blog post, leave a quality comment with your thoughts, and if the blogger allows it, indicate a link back to your blog.  Other people who read that blog will take notice of your comment, and be encouraged to check out your own blog and post their own comments.

This is my point, you should be spending as much time commenting on other blogs (if not more) than writing your own content. A comment becomes a link back to your blog and then more people can find you. I mean ask yourselves how did you find this post?

Here are Kris’ top 5 tips for getting more comments

• Tip #1: Make sure it’s easy for the reader to comment
• Tip #2: Ask Questions
• Tip #3: Respond to people who comment
• Tip #4: Comment on other blogs
• Tip #5: Invite a bit of controversy

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