PR blog

  Guest blog by Peter Smart, Yorkshire head of Managing Partners’ Forum Well, our most recent breakfast meeting created some debate! Benjamin Viney, researcher and author of BDO’s Partner Pay and Performance 2013, compared legal partners’ earnings over the last 30 years. The report examined today’s results in comparison to those found by David Maister, [...]

This week, a new chapter opened in my career as I joined the fantastic team at Northern Lights PR as an account executive.  A ‘proper’ title for someone who trained as a journalist with Thomson Regional Newspapers where job titles were an irrelevance but a keen news sense imperative! One of the bug bears of [...]

This weekend I was on the BBC1 Breakfast sofa with Charlie Stayt and Louise Minchin to talk about Sally Bercow on Twitter. A few weeks ago I was trained for just this moment by The BBC Academy (this link goes to my blog explaining the initiative and tips from the training). So how did it [...]

Senior people are struggling to understand and use Twitter.  Here are 7 easy Twitter training steps for senior people to get you started and be strategic.  Learn how to target potential new customers and build relationships with them – a new form of networking   This week we had a cry from one of our [...]

Mrs Moneypenny of the FT asked this weekend ‘are you an adept user of social media?’  Since most of the FT’s readers are boardroom directors, I would anticipate the answer to that question would not only be ‘no’ but more likely ‘you must be joking’. This is a major issue in the UK: senior people [...]

We’re always looking for examples of businesses that use social media well. Its immediacy can be both a blessing and a challenge in PR. One company that uses social media really well is Petplan. As a B2C pet insurance company, they have a great presence on Facebook, as they know that’s where their customers are. [...]

We have recently been asked this question by a client who has seen a slight increase in their bounce rate since we started to manage their blog. Bounce rate should not be looked at in isolation; it should be considered in the context of other metrics, the type of organisation the website belongs to, and what activities have been happening to cause the increase in bounce rate.

Paris Brown, youth police and crime commissioner – Kent Police, demonstrated why young people do not have the skills to manage social media for corporates.

I was delighted to be asked by Victoria Betton to co-author an ebook for the NHS on using social media to help mental health practitioners. Packed with examples of best practice and case studies, I have been so impressed at how professionals are using social media – from consultants and GPs to occupational therapists and [...]

  This weekend Google changed the algorithms that affect how your website is ranked on its search engine. If your rankings on Google have suddenly changed – this is why. These are probably some of the most significant changes Google has ever made – thanks to @chrisnorton and his excellent blog for alerting us to [...]

Does your company have an intranet?  How useful is it? If your intranet is a useful and time-saving portal that you visit many times a day, then you’re in the minority. An effective intranet that is functional, easy to use and has been created with the buy-in of both senior managers and employees is one [...]

This was the question that a client emailed me last week and it set me thinking.  My immediate response was, it has to be in external comms.   Then I started thinking about some companies where they have outstanding HR teams and it would sit more naturally there. I posted this question on LinkedIn and Twitter [...]

Lucy Kellaway wrote in her FT column this week about the distraction of social media and her own ‘cyber loafing’ at work.

She rightly points out that corporate response to internet abuse is ‘wildly inadequate’, with most companies relying on issuing guidelines and doing some monitoring – but says they might as well not bother.

The Liberal Democrats have had better months. The will they won’t they regarding the Eastleigh By-election is enough to deal with, without the reveal by Channel 4 about Lord Rennard. And of course, there is Chris Huhne’s guilty plea to add to the pile.

Or it could be seen as a good result as the internet is awash with stories, comments and blogs about the controversies surrounding them. And it is all free – you couldn’t pay for such publicity and whilst none of it is positive, it is ensuring daily coverage and encouraging a flock of commentators to come out of the woodwork and blog their two pennies worth.

The horse meat crisis has now been running for a month. How time flies.

Back in January, this blog looked at how Tesco had responded to the initial scare and what a crisis communications plan should look like.

A question from a client made me realise the blog didn’t address internal communications, which of course is as critical as dealing with the outside world.

I was recently asked to give a webinar for Worldmark’s management development programme on understanding the customer.

As always, there is nothing like teaching others to remind yourself of all the things we should be doing in our own businesses.

  We have worked with insolvency practitioners for more than 20 years.  Without doubt, the most difficult part of their job is making people redundant. It’s an extremely pressured job and when you go into a company, your legal duty is to protect the assets of people who have lent money or are owed it, [...]

When done well, Pinterest can be a great part of your overall SEO strategy, and an invaluable source of traffic to your site.

When done badly, it can be a waste of your valuable time, and a possible dent to your brand’s reputation.

With this in mind, here are my top tips on what you should and shouldn’t be doing to build your presence on the internet’s biggest pin board.

  Tesco has had a busy 48 hours.  On Tuesday, Irish food inspectors reported that their ‘value’ burgers had 30% horse meat in them.  By Thursday morning newspaper advertisements appeared in all national newspapers with an apology to their customers. In its advertisements, with the headline “We Apologise”, Tesco says: “We and our supplier have [...]

David Thurkettle of PwC gave his usual thought provoking analysis of trends in law firms from PwC’s Law firms’ survey 2012. I had introduced his session, saying that my own view of the legal market is that it is still very tough, quite patchy and performance is generally flat. David said the survey pretty much said the same thing.