England's football and PR disaster

England's economy is likely to suffer losses of around £2bn after the football team failed to qualify for the finals of Euro 2008 and I am grateful to David Brain who snapped the above replica shirt in Piccadilly, London, the day after the dreadful result.
It is also a PR disaster which the FA obviously saw coming (surely?! Even if they didn't they should have planned for it) but failed to do anything about - the ramifications could run on for more than three years unless the appoint some top notch manager - God perhaps?
According to the British Retail Consortium, the retail figures for beer, flat-screen TVs and fast food during the tournament would typically be around £600m but that figure has been dismissed by experts who said a more realistic number would be £2bn.
Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport Business Strategy and Marketing at Coventry Business School, told the Daily Mail that the probable loss is more than three times that figure: "Evidence from previous tournaments shows that worker productivity normally increases as the England national team progresses through major tournaments and the 'feel good factor' takes hold. A successful run to the 2008 finals would have led to a £2bn bonanza for the economy," he said.
Not one single country from the British Isles will be playing in next year's Euro football tournament and this is likely to have a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy.
My advice to the FA and all the other UK teams as well as the Republic of Ireland is to resurrect the Home Championships - my only worry is that England will probably lose that to. My money would be on Northern Ireland or Scotland.

Great day at BarCampLeeds

I could write at length about BarCampLeeds. It was brilliant! Not too techie. Not too preachie. And attended by really good people. GREEN was pleased to be associated with the event and will be involved in the next Northern BarCamp. Well done to Imran Ali.
Check out the pictures here.

Good luck to Parky and TheBusinessDesk

Well then - good luck to David Parkin, former Business Editor of the Yorkshire Post on the launch of his new venture TheBusinessDesk.com.

We have known David for more years than he cares to remember. He is a talented journalist and commentator with a canny knack of understanding what the Yorkshire region and its business community is interested in. TheBusinessDesk is still very much a Alpha business, given that it is all produced online but if David can get the right handle on the business he will do well.

It will be interesting to see how he adopts new social media tools into the site. At present there is nothing for Digg, Technorati or Del.icoi.us to excite the hardened social media junkie but I am sure that will come.

So good luck to Parky - he launches TheBusinessDesk on 19.11.07.

...and so to BarCamp Leeds

BarCamp Leeds is the city’s first ‘unconference’, a event where the folks that attend create the programme of sessions themselves. And it takes place tomorrow at 9.30 at the BBC’s old regional HQ, now owned by Leeds Met.
GREEN is one of several sponsors involved in the event which is an open, participatory, democratic series of ‘workshop’ at which the organisers and sponsors simply provide wireless broadband, a venue, beverages and food! The attendees provide the content - and the buzz :-). But due respect to Imran Ali for pulling it together.
We’re anticipating sessions on social media, blogging, 3D printing, Augmented Reality interfaces, mobile technology trends, Drupal, games design, co-creation, PR in the digital age, an SEO clinic as well as talks from the founders of BT Bizbox, Plusnet and eDocr.
There’ll also be a great opportunity to network - we’re hoping our Nintendo Wiis will break the ice and Leeds Met’s Old Broadcasting House will provide a fun and inspiring venue.
Come and demo, talk, share or just hang out! Topics that might be tackled tomorrow include:

• Intelligent human-computer interfaces and their possibilities - Reinhold Behringer
• rom start-up to £67m in 10 years - passing on the wisdom and hopefully not the pain) - Lee Strafford
• From startup to £45m in 8 years (Learn from my mistakes) or Launching BT BizBox a small business CRM solution in 5 weeks - Dean Sadler
• SEO Site Clinic - - Dominic Hodgson and Others
• Ladybank Company of Distillers - building a real co-creation business through the internet - Ian Green
• Unleashing social media and technology for the good of local communities - Stuart Bruce
• From Zero to Game in 30 Minutes - Tom Scott
• From a Mobile Telephone to a Computer - a Reality Dysfunction Ian Hay
• Why Wikis suck for post production environment? Capturing the essence of document interactivity - a paradigm shift Manoj Ranaweera - reference
• Drupal - Isriya Paireepairit
• Conquering Time and Space - A survivors guide to distributed dev team management - Ian Pringle
• ePaper? ShmePaper! - (how almost buying an ebook reader made me realise how cool the technology of books is) - 5m40s micropresentation, Guy Dickinson
• LiveCoding: Introduction to Ruby & TextMate - Caius Durling
• How technology can drive regeneration in Northern Cities - Inventya, Valerie De Leonibus
• One of three talks that you can choose from now, Paul Robinson
• Dude! Where’s my hash? - a frank look at OS X after jumping from Windows and my experiences of the past 6 months - Dan Hardiker
• Mind over Matter - How to take control of your state of mind, and of others - Dan Hardiker
• Feed Mailer - (A little demo of Feed Mailer and a round up of the upcoming features) - John Slater & Chris Richardson (This is not 100% confirmed)

Las Vegas and BlogWorldExpo

Sigh! Las Vegas is a very strange place. I am home (in the UK, Yorkshire, Ilkley) by the way after 18 hours via Atlanta. It is cold and raining now but just one day away I was at BlogWorldExpo. By the way the picture shows (left to right) Drew the US Ambassador for FuelMyBlog (FMB) Kevin, me and Marcus.
But Las Vegas is weird. After a couple of days in a conference discussing the development of Facebook and which way Google is going to go. After discussing how best to use social media to help big corps get into the zeitgest that is Web2.0 and talking about mobile blogging, Java programming and how to "join in the conversation" - it was always refreshing to walk out of the LV Convention Centre to be confronted with a buy-one get-one free offer for hookers.
I mean this is a weird town!
Meanwhile, I look like a Cicada beetle - everywhere is air conditioned, which dries you out and when you go outside - in the desert - it dries you out. Taking my clothes off at night I felt like a snake slothing its skin.
Anyway - back to BlogWorldExpo. It was very good but I didn't blog about it when we were there because we had Drew covering this area. Drew is a top man and hopefully caught what was going on.
Myself and Kevin were too busy joining in the conversation on behalf of FMB and spreading the word of European blogging to do much else.
For myself I will write about the following great people I met over during my time in Las Vegas. They are:
Matt Colebourne
Ann Manby
Jim Kukral
Michael Bayer
Voxant
Aaron Zaviles
and
Chitika

Also check out Kevin Dixie and "BenSpark" for a bit of balance on our time in Nevada.
Anyway, keep an eye here and see what I have to say.

GREEN win gold hatrick in awards

Congratulations to the GREEN team for their recent success in the annual public relations awards run by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.
Unfortunately I was abroad in the US at BlogWorldExpo doing some networking and research on social media and missed the event at the Queens Hotel in Leeds. I understand the team had a great time and that perhaps some wine was taken. You can make your own decision based on the picture (left to right) Kathy, Leander, Emma, Simon and Liz. Joe is hiding but I think you can see one eye. Anyway, here are the scores on the doors.

Category 1 - Corporate Communications
Gold - Green Communications, Wensleydale Creamery.

Category 2 - Not-for-Profit
Gold – Green, Beat Blue Monday

Category 8 - Low Budget
Gold – Green, Beat Blue Monday

Category 10 - Best Use of Media Relations
Finalist - Green Communications, Beat Blue Monday.

Category 13 - Best Use of New Media
Finalist - Green Communications, Wensleydaleblog.
Finalist - Green Communications, Beat Blue Monday.

Category 14 - Best Use of Photography or Design
Finalist - Green Communications, Wakefield Cultural Partnership.

Category 18 - Best Website
Finalist - Green Communications, Thinking, Doing, Sharing - www.urbanmines.org.uk.

Category 22 - Outstanding Public Relations Consultancy
Finalist - Green Communications, Green Communications

To Las Vegas and BlogWorldExpo

I am off to Las Vegas in November to attend the first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of blogging and new media.
In addition to the only industry-wide exhibition, BlogWorld will feature the largest blogging conference in the world including more than 50 seminars, panel discussions and keynotes from iconic personalities on the leading-edge of online technology and internet-savvy business.
I am going with Kevin Dixie from FuelMyBlog and Marcus Dyson from eleventeenth.
At GREEN We have already delivered several compelling social media campaigns wrapped up with our usual expertise in PR. However, I am a firm believer that you can always learn new tricks and I am hopeful that I will return with a few more ideas that we can deploy on behalf of our clients.
The conference will be broken down into tracks designed to address specific needs and feature scores of well renowned blogging and new media experts. Topics will include blogging basics, monetizing your blog, podcasting, corporate opportunities in the blogosphere, building readership, RSS, Search Engine Optimization, blogging in the political arena, and other topics vital to serious bloggers who want to solidify their own space, and build their brand in the blogosphere.
If you're planning to be there and would like to meet a few Brits drop me a line

Global PR Blog Week

Constantin Basturea is planning another Global PR Blog Week - with the intriguing suffix Web3.0 - no, I don't know what he means either.
He says it is an event that will present the best articles, interviews, debates, case studies, and essays on how social media continues to change the Public Relations and Communications theory and practice, its relationships with other disciplines, and our roles as practitioners, students, and teachers.
Sounds good.
No dates yet but you can check out his plans here.
I, GREEN and other colleagues will get involved.

Twittering on twitter

I seem to spend a lot of time on Twitter nowadays – hence, the dearth of recent posts on this blog. I like Twitter as the word count for each tweet means that anyone posting on it has to keep things succinct and, as a result, there are some quite profound comments on there.
However, a lot of people just use it to pimp themselves – you know who you are.
What is intriguing thought is how quickly these new social network apps are being acquired by large corporations. First it was News Corp acquiring MySpace, now Microsoft is looking for a piece of the action with a stake in Facebook. Blogger was acquired by Google and Yahoo bought YouTube.
Now it has emerged that Google has acquired Jaiku, a Finnish company that pretty much does what Twitter does only with a few more bells and whistles – I used Jaiku for a while but it simply did not rock my boat.
Google product manager Tony Hsieh says: "Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it's more difficult to keep track of everyone when they're running around at warp speed.
“That's why we're excited to announce that we've acquired Jaiku, a company that's been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most - regardless of whether you're at a computer or on a mobile phone.”
Google is not commenting on its plans for the service but Jaiku is now closed to new users.
So what is the betting that Yahoo! Will now launch a bid for Twitter with the usual proviso that you need a Yahoo! account?

Dylan and the power of social media

To promote his Dylan Greatest Songs album that’s coming out in October, Bob Dylan has created a Facebook application that lets you enter 10 lines of words or phrases. A video of Bob Dylan holding sheets of paper will read out your message. The last few sheets are a promotion for his album, but who cares? It’s a cool app. Create as many as you’d like and send them to friends...
There’s a website for the promotion of the album too, which also lets you create the video mashup and send it out to friends. The Facebook app works best though, because it’s the closest you’ll get to being able to embed the clip anywhere online.

That's the plug for Bob - God Bless Him. But in terms of viral marketing and the best use of social media this is one of the best I have seen. Bob fans will get it straight away but as one of the most iconic music videos to offer this up to the blogosphere is sheer genuis... we might even see if we can co-opt this for a prostate health campaign we are considering at GREEN. See the app below

Alisher Usmanov: A big, fat bully

Alisher Usmanov is a big, fat bloke with an interest in Arsenal Football Club. I’ve never met him – but I’ve just seen his picture on SimonSays. And I think “big, fat bloke” is an accurate description – and is also an honestly held opinion so there are no worries about any claims for libel.
He’s also an Uzbekh oligarch – a person whose political influence effectively rests on his wealth. I would have liked to read more about him on the blogs of Craig Murray – the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan - and political blogger, Tim Ireland, who wrote about their experience and views of Mr Usmanov.
Unfortunately, both their blogs have been closed down following threats from our fat friends’ lawyers. SimonSays points to Ellee Seymour who notes that:

"lawyers letters followed which led to the webhost pulling the plug… Newspapers are not shut down if they face libel allegations, (not in the UK anyway) there is a legal process that is followed. Surely that process applies to bloggers too. If the offending comments were not libellous - and only a court can decide this - then Mr Usmanov’s actions could be deemed illegal. He would have to pay damages. There are all sorts of legal ramifications involved with this story."

Yes, indeed.
Murray is the author of Murder in Samarkand - A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror – an account of the post-USSR Uzbekistan - relaying the problems of living in a brutal dictatorship but also because it shows to what depths the Blair sunk in its attempts to spin the truth and cover up torture (including boiling people alive).
Schillings, the lawyers acting on behalf of Usmanov, was allegedly successful in getting Murray's host to alter some of his posts to present Usmanov in a different light before taking down the site completely.
They also appear to have sent threatening emails to owners of Arsenal Football Club fan sites (Usmanov is an Arsenal shareholder), threatening libel action if any of Murray's statements appear on their sites.
The Google cache of Murray's blog makes for some interesting reading.
I think the answer to this censorship – as pointed out by Simon – is to get as many bloggers writing about the episode. This is my contribution to the big, fat bloke’s story.

Looking for a teacher who seduced her pupils - WTF?

Further to my earlier post, here's another selection of lazy journalist requests – most of them from women’s publications. I make no comment but would like to hear what you think about them. All the quotes are genuine – but I have left off the names of magazine and newspaper titles.

Woman’s Glossy
I'm looking to speak to a teacher who seduced one of her pupils. She must be willing to be named and photographed, as well as telling her story.

Woman’s Glossy
Ever said 'no' to sex?: The boys at [magazine] want to debunk stereo-types that men are all sex monsters, and tell the ladies a thing or two. So we're looking for some MEN to come forward and tell us if they've ever said 'no' to sex, for an upcoming feature. The more unusual the reason the better. We're looking for male candidates to be interviewed, and maybe have their photograph featured for the light-hearted article.

Women’s Weekly
I'm organising a press trip to New York for two people and looking for help with:
Two flights to New York
Accommodation
Places to visit
Places to eat and drink
Shopping Guides
We're looking to travel in October (dates are flexible) and hoping to stay three or four nights to incoperate (sic) a weekend (again flexible)
We're hoping to use this in our Christmas Special so it will get a lot of coverage

National Newspaper
£350 payment - I'm searching for a lady ideally in her 20s or at the very oldest early 30s who's planning to be sterilised in the near future because she's so certain she doesn't ever want to have children. I'd want her to keep a diary of the process for a feature in a national newspaper. I'd want to know all about how she made the decision, how she told friends and family, how she found a clinic, + the operation itself and her recovery afterwards. I'd also need her to be photographed. £350 upon publication of the piece and I'm happy to offer her sight of the copy too.

Woman Freelance
Do you - or any of your clients - have an amazing true life story?
Do you want to see it on the pages of a magazine - and get paid?
Newspapers like [pick anyone at random]and magazines such as [too many to shake a stick at] and other women's magazines feature true life stories on a range of subjects including:

• Health troubles
• Betrayals
• Love stories
• Acts of kindness
• Tragic events
• Love triangles
• Overcoming diseases
• Failed operations

The list is endless really - if you feel your story is newsworthy and of interest to readers then I want to hear from you.

Glossy Magazine
I'm searching for a woman in her twenties who is either currently a sex addict or is a reformed sex addict. I'd require a phone interview and for her to be photographed.
I am also searching for a woman who was a convicted cocaine dealer and is now repentant (sic). Please get in touch urgently if you can help with either.

Glossy Magazine
I'm on the lookout for truly astonishing stories about women aged between 18-50. Do you know a woman that has shed more than 15 stones in weight(yes, the mags are looking for HUGE weightlosses!? Or what about a woman who has survived an illness so rare it doesnt have a name? Or does a woman want to get revenge on a love rat husband?
As an agency, anything goes so please do send me all your ideas and suggestions (but please no stories about women setting up businesses unless there is a truly amazing twist!)

Fry on phones - bizarre

Bizarre – hundreds, nay thousands, of bloggers are writing about the fact that Stephen Fry, the UK’s talented writer and actors, has started a blog.
The picture is undoubtedly him. But it remains to be seen whether Mr Fry is the actual author – if it is him, he has emerged as an Uber-Geek with an impressive knowledge of mobile technology as his first post is about his love affair with all thing Apple and the iPhone in particular – all 6,450 words of it.
The style too is very much reminiscent of Mr Fry’s writing style too:

I accept that price is an issue here; if budget is a consideration then you’ll have to forgive me, I’m writing from the privileged position of being able to indulge my taste for these objects. But who can deny that design really matters? Or that good design need not be more expensive? We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms - why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that? Why don’t the other bastards GET IT??

I expect the truth will emerge in due course once the deadwood media discover the blog. If it is Mr Fry – it was an excellent piece. And is that a Renaissance artist displayed on the iPhone in his hand?

The Boss: Radio Nowhere

I totally love this. And am just waiting for the UK tour. I am also working out the chord sequence on my gi'tar - E, C, G, D?. Am I sad or what?

Mash and men in Fezs

Rumours of Yahoo!'s social media pretensions were vindicated today when they announced the launch of Mash.
The service includes features common to Facebook, MySpace, and My Yahoo. According to TechCrunch you can load a set of modules onto your profile page and move them around drag-and-drop style. The modules include Flickr RSS, Ego Boost, Common Friends, MyMoshLog2, Blog Module (RSS 2.0), Asteroids, Astrology, PimpMyPet, Hover, Kaleidescope, Guestbook, and My Stuff.
Users are encouraged to edit each other’s pages. Each time you visit a profile page, you see new modules that others have loaded for you. TechCrunch says: "This capability certainly adds to the 'mashing' aspect of the social network. It is also appears as though Yahoo intends for users to mash their information together from across the company’s various properties, perhaps making Mash the main hub for Yahoo users."
I wonder if it is all a bit too late given the success of Facebook but given all those Yahoo! user accounts out there I suspect not - I await the email inviting me to join.
Meanwhile, things get more bizarre at Facebook as my son has just set up a new group there called: Top Hats and Fezs: Man's Greatest Invention - that explains the picture anyway.

GREEN in the awards... again

Over at GREEN we are in very good mood - as you can see from the team picture.
We have been short listed for no less than nine Pride Awards – these are the public relations industry’s versions of the Oscars.
We submitted work we have carried out for a wide range of clients including The Wensleydale Creamery, The Samaritans, Beat Blue Monday, Wakefield Council, Urbans Mines and the Cultural Partnership.
What has been particularly interesting for us is that, for the first time, we have entered some campaigns which had a major social media dimension – particularly on Beat Blue Monday and Wenselydaleblog.
Anyway, we will know if we have won at a big dinner in November.

Well done Colin on award

Congratulations to Colin Glass on being named as Business Adviser of the Year in the Institute of Directors Business Awards in Yorkshire this week.
As well as being a top bloke, Marathon runner and being the best networker in the north of England Colin is also chairman of Fuelmyblog and GREEN Communications.
Colin is also a senior partner with Winburn Glass Norfolk Chartered Accountants which he founded in 1975. Since then he has helped many companies develop and grow, raised funds and floated several of them on the London Stock Exchange.
Well done Colin!!

Win One Red Paper Clip

I would like to win this book. Fuelmyblog is currently running a competition to win One Red Paper Clip - to enter just visit here!