Blog posts

Avoid stories about the opening of an envelope

I suffer from cobbler’s children syndrome – I always put aside things I need to do for my business as I’m too busy doing PR for my clients! So, I’ve only just found the time to review Muck Rack’s annual State of PR 2023 report. It says that the top concern for PR pros is […]

Wednesday, July 19th, 2023

Will AI replace the PR Pro?

This is quite a hot topic of conversation amongst my PR friends. The prospect of your hard-earned and learned skillset being replaced by a bit of software is quite a terrifying prospect! However, the current reality is that natural language processing tools driven by AI technology, like ChatGPT and Google Bard, still require humans to […]

Monday, July 3rd, 2023

We’d all love a bit of marketing utopia

Big brands spend cash on the full spectrum of marketing activities, from advertising and email campaigns, to digital marketing and media relations etc. That’s marketing utopia – not affordable reality for most companies. Public relations is often more cost-effective than other marketing tools. The price of placing an advert with a magazine or website would […]

Friday, June 23rd, 2023

Public Relations – too good to be true?

Is good news too good to be true? Tell someone something is excellent and they will usually want to know what is wrong with it.

Thursday, June 22nd, 2023

Don’t shout, have a social media conversation

Many companies which think they ‘do’ social media well, actually don’t. They often view social media as a channel to push out news about themselves, without delivering any real value to their followers. Then they wonder why they don’t get any interaction in the form of retweets, comments, and likes etc. For me, social media […]

Wednesday, June 21st, 2023

The Oxford Comma

We all make mistakes, but it would appear that worrying about errors, such as the “grocers’/grocer’s apostrophe”, is now viewed as unimportant. Surely good punctuation and grammar is an essential element of communicating effectively? The Oxford comma is included before the final “and” or “or” in lists of three or more items, but is optional. […]

Tuesday, June 20th, 2023

Fake news not entirely a figment of Mr Trump’s imagination after all?

An independent review into the future of high-quality journalism in the UK has issued a call for evidence. The fear is that as newspapers close and journalist numbers shrink, there is an increased threat to high-quality journalism in the UK. Statistics evidence the continuing decline of the press market: Total press industry revenues declined by […]

Thursday, June 28th, 2018

Smoke and Mirrors

In PR Week’s Agency Doctor column, Richard Houghton questions ethics in the public relations industry. It struck a chord with me, as one of my friends often refers to my job as ‘smoke and mirrors’, and the first paragraph of Richard’s column refers to peoples’ perception of PR consultancies as being a ‘black art’, ‘spin […]

Thursday, September 25th, 2014

Phone phobia

I’ve just read a PR Week article which looks at phone pitching to journalists, and it seems that things are getting worse in the media relations business. I’ve run my own company for five years now, but before I left my last agency I had noticed that junior staff were becoming increasingly reluctant to pick […]

Wednesday, May 21st, 2014

Good restaurants in Hampshire

In my ‘formative’ PR career years I worked and socialised in London. However, since I moved down to Hampshire seven years ago I’ve realised that there is life outside both the City and the Homes Counties. I also often notice that restaurant reviews in the national media are focused on London. As I adore good […]

Thursday, April 24th, 2014