Comic Relief Red Nose avatar

Source: @rednosin

I was out of the office this morning and the internet connection is playing up on my phone so have been catching up on what the people I follow have been Twittering about over the past couple of hours. I spotted that a couple of people’s avatars had red noses but it didn’t sink in as to why (not enough coffee consumed yet I’m afraid). Then I read a message by Daren Forsyth (@DarrenBBC), which informed me that Comic Relief is letting you customise your picture with a red nose for a small donation of one whole English pound – less than a lemonade in the pub.

All you have to do is follow @rednosin and click through to the site from their Twitter page where in a few short minutes you can pay your pound and make your choice of nose.

Simple and no excuse not to…..I look forward to seeing your pictures.

Will online eventually kill the hardcopy?

The dreaded lurgie has finally caught up with me and as it usually does, just in time for Christmas! Rubbish.

The good part of being at home is being able to catch up with all my reading I haven’t had five minutes to do over the past couple of weeks. Who ever said that things start calming down for Christmas had obviously never worked at Berkeley in December. It has been bonkers with end of year reviews, new business pitches and strategy meetings for the forthcoming year.

Anyway, I read an interesting piece on Media Week which reported that, on average the UK’s leading newspaper websites saw an increase in page views by 23 per cent when compared with this time last year. Encouraging news for the nationals, especially when you keep on reading that the outlook for print publications is so grim. 

According to a report by Deloitte, one in 10 newspapers will either cut print frequency, move entirely online or shut down in 2009. Harrowing reading for the industry, as there is always an obvious knock on affect to us PR professionals. Every time a paper dies the harder we have to work to get our clients noticed by its competitor titles.

Worrying times for the print titles but encouraging to hear about the continued growth of online news. Almost every client I know has a different perspective as to what they prefer. Some are old school and just love to see their name in lights in the hard copy while others have admitted to me that they can’t remember the last time they read their trade title but instead choose to take the highlights from the papers website.

Either way, the thirst for news is still there. I just hope that the news industry finds a way to feed it and still make money.

Berkeley PR on The Weakest Link

Source: www.spot-on-george.co.uk

I was out of the office yesterday afternoon and at 17:35 decided to call in to see if there were any messages for me or anything that I should be aware of. I got no answer. Lazy buggers – they have all gone home I thought to my self and went off to find the journalist I was having a beer with not thinking any further about it.

It wasn’t until this morning that I realised that the whole office were still there, just huddled around the TV in reception. The reason?

Our resident quiz master Emma was appearing on the Weakest Link  against the fearsome Anne Robinson. She did well answering some difficult questions and even got a Berkeley PR mention in there, which has pushed her above me on our internal national coverage league. Well done Em, we are proud of you. Click here to see her performance on iPlayer.

P.S. The caricature isn’t of me before any of you comedians get any bright ideas.

PR Week – best of the tech blogs

Source: PR Week

Big love to the team at PR Week who have listed my entry on LinkedIn applications in their best of technology blogs section again.  I was really delighted to see this listed there alongside Wadds and Melanie Seasons who had also posted some interesting pieces.  Add them both to your blog reading lists when you get a chance and you won’t be disappointed. 

Anyway, back to PR Week.  It is always nice to see your name included in the pages of our industry trade paper but the only problem is that like last week when I attended Flackenhacks with my colleague Jo Jamieson’s name badge, I have again appeared in disguise.  My blog address has been listed as that of my old Berkeley PR buddy Phil, AKA the RedRocket. 

That said his blog is always worth checking out, so if as a result of this piece of coverage some new people discover his musings then all the better.

US Election 2008 – Loss Traced To Paul Stallard

With the US election news hitting fever pitch I stumbled upon a link to the brilliant piece of viral marketing on Wadd’s technology PR blog. Regardless of who you want to win, check out the video below, which again goes to show how important it is for all technology PR professionals to monitor the US elections to see how they are trying to communicate with such an enormous audience. Four years ago you wouldn’t have seen candidates on Twitter or the level of sophistication shown with the viral video below. If these guys can embrace it so can your clients.

more about “US Election 2008 – Loss Traced To Pau…“, posted with vodpod

 

 

What national papers do senior management read?

The 2008 British business Survey published last week, lists the amount of business readers that read the nationals with some interesting results.  According to the research 73 per cent of UK business professionals read their news / newspapers online and a further 40 per cent said they visited the websites of magazines they read.  Additionally 26 per cent said they read this blog.  OK, they didn’t say that but 26 per cent do read a variety of blogs.

With regard to total business readerships the table stood as follows (can you guess which paper listed the stats and was crowing about the results):
The Sunday Times (453,000)
The Times (330,000)
The Daily Telegraph (187,000)
Financial Times (179,000)
The Sunday Telegraph (169,000)
The Observer (147,000)