Monthly Archives: May 2007

events, gapingvoid, marketing, mild insanity, rich records, video, wino's

Oxy-moron at the Wine Fair

1 Comment

Last week I spent a couple of days helping the Stormhoek guys out with their offering at the London Wine Fair. On the Thursday, I spent all day with Andrew Porton chasing round with a live video feed to a video-wall interviewing people on the stands for the official wine fair blog winefairlive.com. The first day I spent more time on my own doing much the same thing, but in a less formal way.

The first of these I’ve uploaded is unusual in that it features more of me than the peeps in the booth. You saw yesterday what I get up to in my leisure time. I thought you’d like to be reassured that it doesn’t get much better when I’m “working”. Hey, I don’t drink – I had to have some fun somehow 🙂

events, policyunplugged, travel

Ah Roma!

070522 080Busy couple of weeks but I’ve just uploaded a bunch of recent pics starting with an excellent day I spent in Rome working for Policy Unplugged on a internal awayday for a large professional services firm. Johnnie Moore held a really stimulating open space for them and I ran around with my camera, while Roy, Cindy & Chris did the *really* hard work

Johnnie blogged about it much nearer the time. I was really glad too that we made the effort to go into the city even for an hour and enjoy good food and sunshine before experiencing the metro and a slow train to the airport on which we passed some of our time speaking to an interesting young man who called himself “Sami”
070522 084

clueless, london, pffft

No, I’m not aquiver with excitement.

When I flicked through the latest Dolphin Square “Tenants Times” I admit I was taken in on first reading, but on closer examination, the letters page seems to make it clear that the story that Prince William is to move into the Square was a spoof – “our exclusive news item which appeared on the DSTA website for one day only Sunday 1 April prompted some of the Square’s wags to have their say.”

However, that hasn’t stopped Hello Magazine and the Daily Express republishing the story, referencing the newsletter as the source. The Express gossip apparently talking to a royal aide to give it some weight.

Update: DSTA gloats on the lack of fact-checking

Blogger Relations, events, london

Still tickets left for Blogger Relations

1 Comment

Thanks to those who’ve blogged and linked to this, especially Richard Stacy & Mike Butcher If you’re still trying to make up your mind, go see what those guys say.

There are still some places left so do go and book here http://www.eventbrite.com/event/58737686

I’m off to the London Wine Fair for a couple of days – god knows how much blogging will happen here in the meantime 😛

announcements, Blogger Relations, events, PR, seminar, social media, training

Better Blogger Relations

4 Comments

Do you know any PR people who know that social media is important and want to get up to speed, but don’t quite know where to start?

I went to the last Chinwag Live called PR Unspun (podcast here) and could see an opportunity for talking in more detail to PR folk about how to move from relating well to the press or the public to relating well to people like me (and you probably), bloggers. Now I won’t suggest we call it BR, as that brings to mind curled sandwiches, cold damp carriages smelling of something awful and “We’re getting there” (oh no you’re not!) but Better Blogger Relations seems to work with people, so I designed a half-day workshop.

I shall introduce people to the basics and then cover:

  • Finding people who are talking about your clients.
  • Monitoring online conversations methodically.
  • Engaging with an online community.
  • How to be interesting to bloggers.

I’m just setting up the first one on Friday week (25th May). As I’ve got it down to a choice of two venues and am just clearing up the details, I thought I’d put tickets on sale through eventbrite anyway – it’s £95+VAT and limited to 12 places. Please do point your favourite, but as yet clue-deprived PR people to the booking page or buy a ticket yourself.

UPDATE: Venue confirmed, it’s: CCT Venues Barbican, Aldersgate House, 135-137 Aldersgate St, London EC1A 4JA

announcements, dumbass, mild insanity, petri, Tests

Time to kill my auto-spam-blog (?)

3 Comments

I think, anyway. I’m going to leave it for another day.

Here’s the story (the following link points to potentially nsfw material, as nsfw as reading your spam folder…):

I set this up on a whim in September 2004 as an experiment in ego-surfing and autoblogging via e-mail – I subscribed to a google alert on a search for my name and pointed it to the blog’s e-mail address so that in theory every time there was an alert, it would be blogged.

Didn’t work after the first couple of days, as you can see – I guessed it was something to do with Google’s terms but had lost interest by then anyway. And then in the last few weeks the address clearly got into some spam lists and went bananas. The timestamps are not reliable as I’m guessing they are linked to the timestamp of the spam.

So my dilemma is whether to just wash this petri dish down the drain or leave it to see what other mould accumulates – is anyone interested in this stuff?

Can you tell I hate throwing anything away? Can you imagine what my home would be like if I’d never shared it with a woman 🙂

buggeration, clueless, events, london, marketing, video

Internetworld 2007 suckfest

4 Comments

I went on Tuesday. I’m sure I should have gone on Wednesday when Chinwag had a thing about PPC and all of my twitter stream seemed to be there.

Actually no, I wish I hadn’t gone at all. The saving graces were unexpected meetups with Ged Carroll, Kevin Anderson and Ian Delaney and an expected meetup with Andy Hyde.

I wanted to interview the big fat blue mouse and the leopard girls (sorry rupert) but they’d gone on a break I think, so I started shooting this B roll stuff and then…

thank god it was free to get in (and out again)

interesting2007, london, walking

Oooh, now that’s….

1 Comment

P4260083 On Monday, I was in Holborn at lunchtime and had a meeting with Russell Davies up in Islington at 2. So I fired up the ever-trusty walkit.com and found out how to walk in an efficient way from Southampton Row to Chapel Market. However, as I was hungry I ignored the initial shortcut and walked up towards Euston, turning right at Guilford Street.

A fascinating walk it was too, through streets mainly lined with slightly grubby Victorian townhouses. What I didn’t notice on the map and directions is that the route took me through Lloyd Square, WC1 in the former Borough of Finsbury, beautiful in the sunshine, but I can imagine a bit grim on a grey foggy day in a sinisterly Dickensian way.

So Lloyd (that’s me), to get to his meeting with Russell, walked from Russell Square to Lloyd Square (and a little bit further).

You couldn’t make it up (or if you did they’d probably look at you a bit funny)