Just back from lunch and the market indicators on the BBC web site are all green (momentarily). That hasn’t happened in a long time.

So, what shape is the downturn? Entrepreneur Charlie Hoult has made it the subject of a series of posts on his blog. His latest post draws on bathtub metaphors and inspiration from Flickr searches.

I haven’t yet taken a bath with my FTSE £1k confidence project but the water is getting chilly. Back in November I spotted that the FTSE 100 had started to fluctuate around a mean of 4,200. At the moment it’s on a downswing at 3,870. It’ll be back.

Charlie urges readers of his blog that are feeling gloomy to check out a video clip of Nick Vujicic a 23 year old motivational speaker from Australia. Now tell me what you’ve got to complain about.

Tags: equity, FTSE, investment, market, turnaround

There now follows a geeky post for which I make no apologies.

I’ve had three new geocaches published today on Geocaching.com: two near my home in Northumberland and one bang in the middle of Elephant & Castle, London. I’ve another geocache that I created in London near the Football Association headquarters in Soho Square that is fast becoming one of the busiest in the City.

If you’ve got a GPS device and want to add a bit of fun to a walk or a run you should consider having a go at geocaching. It’s a great way of get kids large and small out and about.

You could also check out my experiment in network theory called the Geordie Jetsetter Geocoin Project after I read Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks.

I’ve released three geocoins from a geocache near Newcastle United’s football ground and am plotting their movement from cache to cache to their target locations variously in Newcastle, Australia, Newcastle, South Africa and Newcastle, US. So far none of the geocoins have left the country but a frontrunner to the project has landed in Cape Town this week.

Tags: geocoin, geocaching

Snap shows PR blogger Michael Litman ensuring that he stays trim as he samples a blueberry Barcadi Breezer (one unit, 100 calories) at the London Blogger’s meetup (#LBM) meet-up tonight. The event, sponsored by Barcadi Breezer, also heard a pitch from The Next Women, a business magazine for women.

Tags: #LBM

That today’s front paper story in the Daily Mail claiming that social media sites could harm a child’s brain is based on a House of Lords debate that took place more than 10 days ago (thanks to Chris Edwards for the link) tells you everything that you need to know about the quality of the journalism.

Last week we learnt that from the same paper that using Facebook could raise the risk of cancer.

Undoubtedly social media sites are changing the way that people of my generation (and much younger) communicate. People are more accessible and communication hierarchies have been flattened.

I caught up with Loewy’s chairman Mark Adams this morning. He said that peer-to-peer communication on social media sites was the source of most accurate information for details of school openings during the recent heavy snow falls in the UK.

But back to the Mail. How do stories such as this get into the paper, let alone onto the front page? The report results from speculation by Baroness Susan Greenfield during the Lords’ debate in which she said there may be a link between the increased use of social networking by children and attention deficit.

She goes further and proposes that there may be a link between social networking sites and autism using the reverse logic that autistic people find it easier to communicate via their PCs rather than face-to-face.

This is not neuroscience as we know it as Chris Edwards said. Students wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this level of conjecture in a school essay. It’s lazy journalism. And even lazier science.

Will Sturgeon has dissected the story paragraph-by-paragraph and gives further insight into how these types of stories reach the front page of a tabloid newspaper.

Tags: chrisedwards, socialmedia, susangreenfield

How many times have you lost a pitch on grounds of chemistry? It’s an issue that is so endemic in the industry that PRCA vice-chairman Richard Houghton has made it the theme of his blog: A close second.

Do you think the same happens in other professional services industries such as accounting, legal or management consultancy? I don’t think so.

My current pet theory is that the industry’s lack of formal methods – crucially planning and measurement techniques – and its inability to map metrics into a domain that is relevant to business, which means clients are left to differentiate agencies on the basis of intangible variables such as chemistry.

It’s bloody frustrating. But it’s changing. Processes and methods such as those described in reports and papers from Daryl Wilcox Publishing and econsultancy are enabling consultancies to develop formal techniques to plan, implement and measure in financial terms that a marketing director and board can understand.

There are some really innovation projects going on around the industry on the development of formal methods by people such as Ged Carroll (reputation), Tim Hoang (SEO and keyword planning), Phil Sheldrake (analytics), Andrew Smith (SEO and planning) and Will McInnes (measurement).

Inevitably I’ve missed out lots of people at the vanguard of the industry, people that are getting on with the job of recalibrating and redefining their businesses, or starting over from scratch.

We’re investing heavily and learning from colleagues in other marketing disciplines within Loewy. I’d love to talk anyone that wants to listen about the investments that we are making and the formal techniques and tools that we are developing.

Tags: formalmethods, planning, PR

Bill Hilton (@billhiton) tried to wind Dan Howarth (@danhowarth) and me up last week by forwarding on a blog posting from Media Post about how PR people and professional Twitter users are killing the network with excessive noise.

It simply isn’t the case.

Twitter is a truly democratic network in which an individual must earn the respect of another user in order to engage in conversation and become a part of their network. Users that don’t follow these basic principles simply are ignored, aren’t followed or are blocked.

Loewy colleague Phil Whitehouse who works in the digital crew at The Team has created the Twitter Ten Commandments (@tencommandments) which develops these basic Twitter tenets.

Tags: spam, twitter

Daryl Wilcox Publishing (DWPub) published an excellent 12-page white paper last week that is an excellent primer on digital PR for anyone in the PR industry. It’s free and is called: Online PR in action – an introduction to implementing and measuring a digital PR programme.

I’d go as far to say that it should be required reading for anyone that hasn’t yet explored the potential of audience and keyword planning, and PR-led content as a strategy for influencing SEO.

The paper, written by escherman’s Andrew Smith describes how formal methods can be applied to the planning, execution and development of PR campaigns.

The first section of the paper develops the work of David Meerman-Scott and plots out how PR can influence the route from web search to purchase, taking in Google planning tools and the use of LinkedIn and Twitter as research tools. The second section examines platforms to implement a campaign and some of the basic measurement techniques.

The paper flirts with the potential of social networks but I suspect this will be the subject of another document. Inevitably the paper touts the services of DWPub for planning and as a route to target audiences but its no worse for it.

Digital PR must become a core skill for the PR industry. If you have yet to get to grips with digital techniques then this white paper is a good place to start.

Tags: andrewsmith, digitalpr, dwpub, onlinepr

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Spammers are abusing Twitter. And I don’t mean folk that constantly pimp their content or abuse the RT function on Tweetdeck.

No these are old fashioned spammers: debt advisors, purveyors of dodgy pills and porn merchants, to name but a few. They find you through keyword searches based on the content of your Tweets and follow you in the hope that you’ll check out their profile, website link and maybe even follow them back.

I spotted the trend after writing a couple of blog posts about the equity market and social lending.

You could of course make your Tweet-stream permission based or simply block dodgy followers. But how about turning the situation into a pub game?

The objective is to attract Twitter followers faster than your opponent by baiting Tweet spammer with alluring messages. The only rule is that you can only Tweet a bait every 15 minutes. Its geeky, no doubt, but a lot of fun. My record is 14 dodgy followers in an hour.

Twitter is a perfect network in so much as its possible to remove all the noise you’d normally receive in a social network and focus only on the messages from the people that you want to receive. Spammers have not role within that network. But there’s an easy solution – block them or have a bit of fun.

Tags: spam, twitter

“We’re living through an industrial revolution for the first time in a lifetime for anyone over 60 years old. All the rules are changing. Its no wonder everything feels a little crazy at times.”

In his London session this afternoon Seth Godin sounded the death knell for push marketing as he pulled content from his books Meatball Sundae and Tribes.

“Social networks enable everyone in an organisation to become a brand advocate. In the future individual employees will be an organisations most powerful sales and marketing resource. In this new world marketing and PR teams will facilitate conversations, provide content, and light touch guidelines.”

This morsel was part of a conversation over breakfast with Rainier PR’s Ruth Jones and The Team’s Peter Blake and Phil Whitehouse.

Tags: sethgodin, socnets