The Media Blog – add it to your blog roll

Source: The Media Blog

A blog I follow updates from religiously on Twitter is The Media Blog, founded by Will Sturgeon. It casts an eye over the media, looking at everything from the tabloids and broadsheets in an amusing way.

It has a number of collaborators but is well worth checking out. Great job Will, Jon, David, Jon, Pete, Nadia and Neil….keep up the good work lads and lasses.

Blogging tips from The Count…

Blogging tips

I am always on the lookout for some tips on how to improve my blogging skills. There are literally thousands and thousands of posts about this subject but the one which has caught my attention the most recently was this post on Copy Blogger. It is a great example of how a headline and an image can capture your attention in the first couple of seconds of scanning but also most importantly how vital it is to have great content.

Sonia Simone has written a post about how Sesame Street has some important lessons for bloggers. Really? Well she has listed five top tips that make a lot of sense

1. Testing, testing
2. The people in your neighborhood
3. Make it snappy
4. Focused variety
5. Once more, with feeling

Read her blog to understand the points above better and more importantly to see how you can apply them.

The world’s leading…

I was surprised to hear when chatting to a couple of people who work in our industry that they hadn’t come across The World’s Leading… blog. If you haven’t as well, make sure you check it out as it is a classic.

Written from within our industry it is a brilliant mix of gossip, news and cheeky banter which helps to keep your feet on the ground. If you want to know what is happening behind the scenes have a look.

PR Week: Best of the tech blogs

Paul Stallard

Being outside of London, I always look forward to getting my copy of PR Week delivered to my intray on a Friday. Today’s read came with an added bonus of seeing that a blog post I had written last week was included in the best of tech blogs section.

For someone who like to find new and interesting people to follow, this section is generally my first port of call upon opening the magazine and I am delighted to be listed alongside two PR professionals that I admire. Dirk Singer has written a nice piece on questioning the orthodoxy that it’s boom time in social media marketing and Sherilynne Starkie discusses pitching the media via Twitter on her top five PR stories for May (she mentions my interview with Guy Clapperton in her list).

If these two aren’t on your reading list then check them out. Also, big thanks to PR Week for helping kick start my bank holiday weekend. Much appreciated guys. Oh, and if you haven’t done so already, check out PR Week’s new site and in particular its new blog section .

Don’t forget to communicate

Source: Google images

Since I started writing this blog the one aspect of its creation which I have enjoyed has been the contact with others in the blogosphere. If you write a blog then receiving a comment on what you have written is a great feeling. Especially, if you have never met/spoken to that person before.

I have always felt very lucky that the PR industry has a number of both intelligent and brilliant bloggers, who are happy to share their views and thoughts. Through this blog I have been able to open a conversation with a number of them and now find my self flicking through the pages of PR Week looking for familiar names and faces.

That said, I have observed the dynamic change over the past few months. With the rise of Twitter I have steadily seen the decline in the amount of posts from bloggers I follow and certainly the level of commenting across the board. I have written a couple of times about, how on a Sunday I like to catch up on my blog reading. This gives me the opportunity to reach out to those in my community, try to engage in conversation and to open myself to new ideas which have been expressed by my peers. In truth it is one of my favourite times of the week.

Who writes blog content?

My colleague Rebecca Wheeler wrote an interesting blog today about a survey from JD Power & Associates. According to the survey nearly four in 10 bloggers say they would pay news organisations to reuse news content. I agree with Rebecca that I don’t see this as the saviour for newspapers as to be honest bloggers can copy their news for free and just add some comment relatively easily.

However, this story did came in the same week that I saw Guy Kawasaki is paying two people to ghost write his posts on Twitter.

Are we approaching a new dawn for bloggers? If you can buy content for your blog and pay people to write your content on social networks such as Twitter is there a danger that your personality gets lost?

I was talking to another colleague Jo Jamieson the other day who writes a personal blog as well as the day job one. She met up with some bloggers from her community and they all expressed how they thought that she spoke exactly the same way as she wrote on her blog. I try hard to do a similar thing here and feel that is part of the charm of blogging. Surely, if content is not being generated by the owner of a blog it will lose its personality?

What do you think?

I’m PR Friendly

Source: Brendancooper.com

A blog which has been on my blog roll for some time now is Brendan Cooper’s, where he covers all things about social media – drop by it if you get five, it is well worth a visit. Brendan is a social media specialist who understands that it doesn’t have to be complicated; it’s simply about enabling people to share things – opinions, news, lives.

On his blog he produces a list of the most influential PR blogs (please see Brendan’s site for information on how he prepares the list) and I was pleasantly surprised to see this blog pop up for the first time at number 86. I wasn’t alone in being a new entry to list as I was also joined by the following:
• Ron Torossian
• Teaching PR
• Final Spin  
• Sir Robert Bond Papers
• Becky McMichael
• Me
• Sixty Second View
Regardless of whether you believe in these lists of whether you think they serve any value apart of link baiting for the person who produced it there is no denying that it does provide a list to check how up-to-date your blog roll is. I wonder if now that I am on Brendan’s PR Friendly list whether I will be able to make it onto his blog roll?

TIME’s Best Blogs of 2009

Source: Google images

I am currently having my blog re-designed and hope to be able to unveil it shortly. One of the things I am also looking to refresh along with the look and feel is the little things such as my blog roll. There are a couple which currently reside on mine which I am not sure should still be there and some rather obvious and unforgivable obmittions (sorry Sally – I promise you will be on the updated version).

At this point I came across TIME’s Best Blogs of 2009 list with a couple which I will make sure are now included on my updated blogroll. Below is the full list with links to TIME’s description of each and a link to the blog itself:

Sunday reading

Source: www.stjohnshoward.org

While chatting in the office about the amount of traffic to our website and personal blogs we mentioned that traffic obviously drops on a Saturday with less people inclined to visit when not in their office but traffic does pick up on Sunday. An interesting observation and one which I wasn’t too surprised about as I personally find Sunday afternoons a good time to catch up on my online reading.

With less distractions and more time to sit and think about what I have just read I often find it the source of my inspiration for the forthcoming week. It also gives me the time to visit the blogs listed in my blogroll and try to build my communication with them without feeling guilty that I should be working on behalf of my clients.

So to all you Sunday visitors hello and I know where you are coming from.

PR Week – Best of the tech blogs

Paul Stallard

As I have mentioned before I love getting coverage for my clients and nothing starts a day better than seeing your hard work appear online or in the pages of a target title…….or hearing/seeing your client. This was the subject of one of my blogs earlier in the week when I discussed the buzz in my PR agency, Berkeley PR, as we listened to our clients being interviewed on the radio.

Well as you can see from above, the post was picked up by PR Week and listed as one of the best of the tech blogs this week. Massive thanks to the team at PR Week and great to see my effort listed alongside two other great posts from Jed Hallam and Jon Clements. If you get a chance read them both and add them to your blog rolls – you won’t regret it.