As Communications Director at UKFast, I occasionally do presentations to businesses on the ways they can boost their brand using the Internet. At the end of last week I did a talk with the CIPR in Manchester on podcasting as part of an Online PR evening. We did a similar event back in March this [...]

We were talking about how some of the national newspapers used pay-per-click tactics to appear on searches for Pavarotti in the days following his death. One paper in particular seems to be using this strategy on a weekly basis. Lawrence Jones has an insightful blog about Anita Roddick and The Telegraph, which is one of [...]

It is amazing what the internet has done for customer recommendation. With a record number of people saying that they search online for reviews of a product before purchasing, we’re now finding that the general public are becoming very savvy about what is and what is not genuine independent praise. The idea that we can [...]

Some results from a survey by PR agency immediate future have been published this week and they look at the Internet’s most talked about brands. The study takes the Interbrand Top 100 Companies and looks at how they rank when considered in terms of the volume of mentions they receive online. On the whole the [...]

For the first time since Internet adspend began its dizzying climb, television advertising spend has dropped. A new report into online adspend shows that in the UK internet advertising has now broken the £2bn mark. When I began watching these figures in early 2005, internet was catching up with radio spend. In the UK, we [...]

Yesterday I attended a seminar session in Manchester called Meet the Northern Correspondents, which added to the newspapers’ online debate. The two speakers were Helen Carter of The Guardian and James Wilson of the FT. Helen revealed that some departments have a ‘Web First’ policy meaning that their stories appear on the web and then [...]

It seems to me that politicians are really harnessing the internet now and truly undertanding the power that it can afford them. Well, they are in the US and France anyway. It’s not just that the presidential candidates themselves are doing it but by extention the online community is also creating a buzz about each [...]

The Direct Marketing Association in the US has done its first major survey focussed on the b2b sector, discovering that the biggest single area of spend is direct response communications. The most interesting finding for me is that the US statistics separate off online marketing and online PR (termed new media). Within direct response communications, [...]

The BBC is well established as the UK’s strongest web presence and so last month’s announcement that BBC Jam, the online learning service for 5-16 year-olds, was to be suspended will have been a great relief to any company looking to compete in that market. As a B2B hosting provider, UKFast has a number of [...]

It’s obviously good news that the UK has fallen out of the ‘dirty dozen’ spam sending nations in a new report by Sophos but the main reason we have fallen out of the list seems to be because other nations are now sending more, rather than the fact that we are sending less. The new [...]