So, what could be better than spending a day with The Hoff talking to an enviable stream of journalists about the launch of Clintons new Celebrity Fastcard – video greetings cards for mobiles and MMS – and hosting a showbiz event at No5 Cavendish Square that’s resulted in great coverage.  Quite frankly, nothing.

Having dealt with multiple stakeholders, celebrity brand ambassadors and the cream of the UK celebrity and showbiz press, here are our top five tips for throwing a top party:

1. Never lose sight of why the event is taking place! Whilst it’s important to get the styling, canapé and cocktail selections right, it’s so much more important to keep the bigger picture in sight: What will the press want to get out of it? What will get people talking – before, during and after the event? What opportunities exist for creating as much content around the event as possible?  Will it deliver the right brand and commercial value for our client?

2. Always consider how to get longevity from your event. Whilst the event itself may be over in a few hours, video content, interviews, photography – and more – captured at the event, will give you a reason to talk about your cause for longer. Likewise, consider how else you might get further leverage from the event by involving consumers via competitions to attend, hosting live twitter feeds and debates, installing webcams etc.

3. Never scrimp on quality when capturing content at events, which are often noisy and badly lit for photography and film; this isn’t a job for a flipcam! You only have one chance to get the content that you need, so ensure that it’s professionally handled.

4. Organisation and communication are key – in equal measures. Every team member should have clear responsibilities but it’s equally important that daily updates amongst the whole team take place, as each detail will affect another. A comprehensive running order with even the smallest details listed should be accessible to everyone involved and kept updated.

5. Consider a ‘B plan’ for every detail so that you’re prepared when more photographers than anticipated turn up, when VIP guests arrive early – or late or when the champagne runs out earlier than expected! However, the most important element to a successful party and creating a big impression in a small amount of time, is being quick to adapt and react to the unexpected; some things you just can’t plan for!

For a sneak peek of the party and The Hoff in action click here to see what went on.

One week on and to date the launch event has generated over 45 items of coverage including broadcast, online and national print including the Daily Star, Daily Express & Metro plus over 2,700 new Facebook fans engaging with the brand on the Clintons Facebook page.

Celebrity Fastcard went on sale today exclusively at Clintons stores nationwide and on their website.

As we regularly talk to our clients about the value that can be gained from visualising data, I thought I’d take my own advice and create a few infographics from my findings. Some of the figures are a bit hard to see due to size constrictions, but if you click on each image it’ll take you through to an interactive version where you can view the data in all its glory.

All infographics were created using Many Eyes – an absolutely brilliant free tool for visualising data.

Throughout the day more than 160 tweets were posted, with many people offering their thoughts on the presentations that they had seen, commenting on the demonstrations that they had received and what they were hoping to get out of attending the show.

But despite this just eight of the 33 exhibitors were tweeting about the event and only two of them tagged their tweets with the official #CEE11 hashtag yesterday. This meant that people who were following the stream of tweets about #CEE11 might have missed out on their tweets.

It seems to me that some of the exhibitors missed out on a great opportunity to engage with their target audiences online, many of whom were having conversations about the event on Twitter.

However a few companies were getting it very right. Matt Wood from Amazon Web Services (@mzee) shared his presentation on Slide Share and Molton Technology posted a sneak peak of the presentation that Ivo Murris will be giving today.

I also thought RackSpace had been very clever by snapping up Google Ads for searches for “Cloud Expo Europe”. Highly targeted search advertising, such as this, can be a very effective way of reaching a specific audience, without having to spend a small fortune.

Day two of Cloud Expo Europe is already underway, and I’ll be posting another blog tomorrow about the online activity surrounding the event today.

Related articles

• A day at CloudExpoEurope ’11 (secyority.com)
• Open Source Expo 2011 (alexhudson.com)

Take a look at the page now and let us know which places you think are fantastic -  http://on.fb.me/dFzmkv

And of course, feel free to follow us on Twitter. We’re @PR_Eats!

 Our industry has moved rapidly to mirror the pace and appetite for content & conversations that new media channels demand. It’s modernising its approach and so too must graduates seeking their first break.

 Don’t get me wrong, the determination and ambition to succeed hasn’t changed but the approaches needed have.

 So here’s a few pointers:

 - Do your research – read about the industry you are so passionate about, find out the challenges, what the hot topics are. Decide the kind of PR you want to do and whether it’s in-house or agency and then find out as much as you can about that organisations clients, campaigns, people and graduate scheme. You need to interrogate the business to ensure it’s right for you and provides good grounding to move up the ranks. Watch out for details of the new Speed grad scheme-coming soon.

- Have an opinion: high calibre grads who demonstrate understanding will make an impact- and stand out. Get your opinions out there. Guaranteed, potential employers will find it.

- Engage with your audience: it’s not enough to have a recruitment agent and think that’s all you have to do. Agencies don’t want to pay agency fees. If you make it easier for them to find out about you with direct contact, and you’re what they’re looking for, it’s a win win. Find out where the people you want to influence are and how to contact them e.g Linked-in, Twitter, blogs, email. Then use that opinion & knowledge about them, their business and the industry to create difference. A tailored approach to three contacts is better than a broad brush approach to 100s.

And to Miss Badcock, who asked whether her name would be a hindrance in launching her own blog, I look forward to reading your first introductory ‘embarrassing name’ edition – great fodder right there.  Good luck.

For years I have struggled with musical motivation, choosing a song to learn and sticking at it. So I have decided to let Twitter decide for me.

The rules

1. Every week Twitter will choose a song for me to learn
2. The song must have a recognisable bassline
3. No matter what the genre, I must give it my best shot – even if it’s a genre I hate
4. I will attempt to record and post my (perhaps miserable) effort online

So if you want to get the ball rolling with suggestions, send me a message @simonpmatthews

So I ask, what can Twitter do for me?

As the news, from comScore, that we’re now spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google breaks, I get a message saying “Nicole, you’re starkers in a picture on your wall!” My immediate reaction was one of shock and horror – how could there be an explicit picture on my Facebook wall?! Completely confused and searching frantically on my Facebook account for any photos – even though, for the record, it’s not possible that there are naked pictures of me circulating the internet – I probed and probed; “what pictures are you talking about?”

So after ten minutes of desperate searches, no images appeared. The wall was actually the one in my parents study, not my Facebook ‘wall’ and the picture was when I was barely two showing off my beautiful baby bottom (things have changed since then). Although I was relieved it also got me thinking… when did we become so caught up in the online world? When did a wall immediately mean my Facebook page?

Whilst I think brands have a long way to go in terms of developing their social media strategy, it is with little wonder why more and more are turning to it as another marketing channel. It is an incredibly powerful tool when you consider that 9.9 percent of people’s Web-surfing minutes for the month are spent on Facebook.

So today I read an article on the BBC’s website entitled, “How the internet is changing language”.

If you speak to anyone around the office they will tell you that I have a deep and emotional hatred of people abbreviating when they speak. By this I mean ‘obvs’ for obviously, ‘totes’ for totally and ‘defs’ for definitely.

It’s like someone smacking me repeatedly in the face with a large, incorrect, dictionary. There is just no need for it.  My life, and I imagine the speaker’s life, is not going to benefit in anyway from the millisecond ‘obvs’ will save if said in replacement of ‘obviously’.

I can assure you I don’t have such a hectic and incredibly important life where those milliseconds can all be racked up so that I can spend more time discovering cures to terminal diseases or solving world hunger. To illustrate this, I spent four hours yesterday playing Batman on the Playstation, in my pants. I can safely say I have enough time on my hands to listen to the full word rather than its abbreviated backward cousin.

While the BBC article gives examples of where abbreviation has helped, or in some cases is completely necessary (take Twitter for example), this shouldn’t mean that people go about life speaking as if they only have 140 characters with which to get the message across.

I guess that is the thing that irritated me the most; there is no practical reason why people are now saying ‘actch’ instead of actually. It’s just some Paris Hiltonesque language that began with OMG and has slowly evolved into this dumbed down version of an already dumbed down language.

It’s a way of communicating that needs to be met with anger and a point blank refusal to acknowledge the sentence that contained the offending abbreviation.

According to an article yesterday in Total Telecom, global smartphone shipments have surged 43% to 60 million units as more and more of us take up using the devices. It isn’t just consumers or business users either; militaries around the world are looking at uses for smartphones.

The US military has recently been considering ways to take advantage of social media, and no doubt the mobile internet will be a part of that. Smartphones in the hands of soldiers wouldn’t just be for Twitter though. Defence companies have been working on mobile apps for war. IT Pro today has posted a story about software that gives a soldier the ability find enemies in the surrounding terrain using a mobile phone with the Android operating system.

The software could be powerful enough to pick up aerial images from unmanned aircraft or satellites and then focus in on details like license plates or facial features.

It sounds like neat stuff, and would be very interesting if it ever makes it to the consumer market; Google maps to a scary new level! But we may not have to wait for consumer-friendly versions of military apps to be released before we get a sneak peak, if figures this week from the UK MoD are anything to go by. An iPhone 4 Gizmodo style leak might be expected.

From SC Magazine, it turns out that the MoD has been having a hard time trying to hang on to their gear. A freedom of information request has revealed that 440 laptops were lost or stolen in the past two years. As well as laptops, they’ve lost hundreds of DVDs, CDs and disks, 96 hard drives and 13 mobile phones. Worst of all, much of the data on lost devices wasn’t encrypted. Who knows what cool software or data is waiting on a forgotten phone in the tube’s lost and found.

Photo by Flickr user iamian_, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It is “a day to celebrate the revolution of media becoming a social dialogue,” and back in my home and native land, the City of Victoria, British Columbia’s capital, has made it official.

They have proclaimed Social Media Day officially, and for some great reasons:

Photo Credit: Paul Holmes (used with permission)