Andrew Smith's Blog
Friday Roundup 27th August 2010
The transformation of the CIPR
Why poor backlink requests are like bad PR Pitches
The key qualities they share are irrelevance and lack of personalisation.
Journalists hate getting mass-mailed irrelevant junk. And in a similar way, if you run a website or a blog (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of us these days), it is just as annoying to get spammy link requests.
I’ve yet to receive a carefully crafted and personalised request for a backlink that shows the person making the request understands what my blog or sites are all about. More...
Does the average UK Facebook user spend 24 hours per month on the site?
According to Google, the average session time was 26.40 mins – not wildly dissimilar to Hitwise’s estimate. Perhaps even more interesting, Google claims that the average number of visits per UK Facebook user last month was 51 (worldwide average is 33).
On Google’s figures, that would suggest the average UK Facebook user spent 1360 minutes on the site last month – or nearly 23 hours.
On Hitwise’s figures that would come to nearly 24 hours per month. More...
Friday Roundup 13th August 2010
PR is a people business. And that’s it’s biggest problem.
Reach versus engagement: the new online battleground for PR and media
Because the means of providing a verifiable link between editorial coverage and business impact was either prohibitively expensive or just not possible, there has been a largely accepted assumption that positive press coverage is valuable – period.
In the past, the notion of measuring engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical. Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for engagement (if a newspaper has a readership of 2 million, then we assume that a large proportion must be in some way engaged with some or all of the content – we just aren’t sure which content and to what degree. More...
Friday Roundup 30th July 2010
Social proof: why we bother about people "just like us"
Friday Roundup 16th July 2010
Three degrees of influence - or marketing success as an artificially induced cascade
Pogoplug allows printing from iPhone, iPad, Android or any other device, no matter where you are
For the first time, Pogoplug users will be able to print from an iPhone, iPad, Android or other mobile device from anywhere in the world.
Pogoplug cloud printing will initially support all HP printer models and all Epson printers released since 2005. Set-up is simple and straightforward; once a printer is connected to a Pogoplug, it is ready to use.
Additionally, users can email any document directly to their Pogoplug for printing. Printers can be shared with friends, family and colleagues or used to create printer ‘hotspots’ for temporary access to a printer in a public location. More...
How UK PR firms can improve their SEO capability overnight for £85
About 18 months ago*, I paid around £85 for a piece of software called Market Samurai. I can hand on heart say it is has been one of the most valuable tech investments I’ve made in that time.
To describe it as a general internet marketing tool doesn’t really do it justice. Whether it is drastically reducing the amount of time to handle keyword research or detailed analysis of SERPs, I constantly refer to it.
One of things that stands out for me is the vast amount of useful training material provided by the Market Samurai team – for free. Just watching a few of these videos would probably save PR firms many man weeks and hundreds of pounds of Mickey Mouse training from less reliable sources. More...
Friday Roundup 18th June 2010
Why are search agencies more profitable than PR firms?
