Vodafone has today launched a Google mashup map using the #ukhols hashtag on Twitter. The map serves to highlight the company's pledge to abolish roaming charges in many countries during June, July and August.

Twitter users are invited to add themselves to the map by tweeting the #ukhols hash tag followed by their age, gender, post code and their holiday destination.

Using social media like this can be a great way to build a brand's profile online and generate lots of quality coverage in both the traditional media and the blogosphere. Vodafone's map has already gained coverage in the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, and Brand Republic.

The mashup comes a month to the day since I launched my National Work From Home Day map, which was based on the #uksnow map developed by Ben Marsh, who is behind this map too!

And with that I'm off on my hols! See you in a week or two...

It's the fourth annual National Work From Home Day, so I'm sat here on my laptop doing just that. The day is part of Work Wise Week, which is an initiative led by the TUC, CBI and British Chambers of Commerce to promote smarter working practices.

To support the day, I have developed a Google Maps mashup for Speed that uses Twitter to allow home workers to display their location. To take part you have to send a tweet containing #NWFHD and the first half of your postcode ie: "#NWFHD WC2H". The site will then automatically update every 30 seconds throughout the day, displaying the location of Twitter users working from home.

The idea is based on the #UKSNOW mashup devised by software programmer Ben Marsh in February to plot areas of snowfall across the UK in real time.

The blogosphere and twittersphere is rife with journalists, PROs and members of the public identifying and publicising errors of judgement made by companies and PROs. It's argued that by drawing attention to 'PR fails' we can as an industry learn from these mistakes and collectively raise our game.

One website that serves to draw attention to bad PR practices is PRfail.tumblr.com. The site was setup nearly a year ago by Jonathan Hopkins to aggregate examples of bad PR highlighted on websites such as Twitter, which sees many users attach the #PRfail hashtag to their tweets.

The site now features plenty of PROs who have pointed our mistakes made by their peers or by the companies they represent, but is this wise?

If I were to criticise a company's mistake on my blog or on Twitter, Google would automatically connect my name and the name of the company I work for to the name of the company I badmouthed. So if I or the company I work for were to then pitch for a PR brief by that company it would only take a quick search of those names, for example Nike and Speed Communications, to bring up my blog post or my tweets in the first few results. I'm pretty sure that digging up old mistakes that a potential client would rather forget, is probably not the best way to make a good impression.

That said, identifying a 'PR fail' and offering a solution as to how the company might have dealt with that crisis more effectively could demonstrate expertise. Though I'm not sure how much expertise you can demonstrate when you've already used up 7 characters of your 140 character tweet with a #PRfail hashtag!

My mind's not totally made up on this. Do you think we should be more careful about what we say online or use our freedom of speech to highlight bad PR in an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff?

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The Blog Council, the world's leading forum for large companies to share best practices in social media, yesterday appointed Bob Pearson as the organisation's new President. Bob previously worked as Vice President of Communities and Conversations at Dell, where he oversaw the company's global social media efforts.

The Blog Council was setup in 2007 to give senior executives in charge of social media at the largest corporations in the world, a platform to share ideas and to learn best practices. The Council now has more than 40 members, including the Coca-Cola Company, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft.

I caught up with Bob to find out why he thinks blogs can benefit businesses.

How long have you been blogging?
I have been communicating online for many years, but I really started blogging during the last 3 years. I blogged a lot internally for Dell's One Dell Way and Marketing Blog to reach Dell's 80,000 employees and I did a series called 'TechKnowledge' on Direct2Dell where I interviewed leading experts about the future of technology. You can expect me to blog on a regular basis related to social media trends on the Blog Council's blog.

Why did you start blogging?
It' important to listen and learn with your customers, which is a two-way street. Blogging allows any of us to share a point of view and then listen to the comments. I have to admit I read every comment every time for my posts. You learn a lot from what people enjoy and, quite frankly, just as much when your post is greeted with silence.

How can businesses benefit from writing a blog?
This is a long list, but here's a few key points.

• Customers are co-creating messages of brands everyday. If you aren't communicating online, you aren't really shaping your brand effectively.
• There are hundreds or thousands of conversations occurring everyday about a brand. At Dell, we could see 5-10,000 conversations per day. If you know what customers are interested in, your blogging can become a relevant part of the conversation.
• Blogging is really symbolic, in my view, of telling your story, which is also done well with video, photos, twitter, facebook and many other ways to round out how you share content.
• Overall, it's really a company's approach to joining in the conversation that matters the most. Customers can see who really cares and, most importantly, who is trying.

What concerns do businesses have about blogs - and why?
I would flip that around. What concerns should businesses have about how their brands are being shaped without their knowing it? What issues do they not know about due to a lack of strong blog monitoring? How well is a company preparing for a future where 500,000 new people go online everyday for the first time in their lives? Social media is a new discipline that is transforming how we speak with customers, how we conduct e-commerce and how we unlock the knowledge of our employees. The leaders are realising their social media strategy may start with a blog, but this is only a first step.

Should every business blog?
Yes. Every business has conversations with its customers via the phone and in person. Why not via a blog? In a few years, this question will sound like "should every business have a website?" Of course so. Same with a blog.

Which blogs do you particularly admire?
I enjoy reading Jeremiah Owyang's Web-strategist. If I want to listen to a podcast, I think Neville Hobson and Shel Israel do great work. If I want to see what the world is saying, I look at my customised Netvibes screen or my new Tweetdeck summary.

How do you think Twitter has affected the blogosphere?
Twitter is making people think, which I love. Twitter is showing us that people are willing to follow accounts where they can get information they want at their convenience. Unlike email, which shows up in your inbox whether you like it or not, you have a choice on Twitter to visit or not visit a site. Someday, people will receive the content they want wherever they want it, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, MySpace and they will receive it all at the same time. It will redefine how we distribute content. For example, if I want an update from Starbucks, I might want to only receive it in Twitter and if that can be done, I'm in. If I'm looking for a new bike, maybe I only want updates that contain reviews and new videos delivered to my Facebook account for a certain period of time. So, give Twitter a lot of credit for opening up new ways to reach people effectively. Its power goes well beyond the fact that it is a microblogging tool.

Follow Bob on Twitter: @bobpearson1845

(Please note that this interview was previously posted on the Speed Communications blog)

A Murdoch owned national newspaper is said to have spent more than £7m on new office equipment in an attempt to keep up with a growing demand for instant news. Citizen journalists using microblogging site Twitter to report news stories in a matter of seconds are blamed for raising public demand for faster news reports.

Journalists at the newspaper are to be provided with ergonomically designed keyboards that can increase typing speeds to 140 characters per second. The keyboards, which contain high quantities of caffeine, use nano technology to invigorate tired hacks' hands so that they can type faster and for longer periods of time. Tests by the manufacturers found that journalists could type 5 articles per minute when using the keyboards, which cost £10,000 each.

The announcement comes just days after the publication ditched plans to employ a crack team of 10 Twitter correspondents after a trial at sister company Sky News was called a bit silly by the press. The press were unavailable for comment.

Labels: April fools day

Loewy today launched a new UK PR consultancy called Speed.

Speed specialises in the business, consumer, corporate, and technology sectors, and has been formed by bringing together the teams of BMA Communications, Custard PR, Lighthouse PR, Mantra PR and Rainier PR. All of these teams were acquired by Loewy in the past three years. The new consultancy structure and brand is effective from today.

"The PR industry has reached a watershed moment and we've designed Speed to deliver on what clients need now and for the future," said Stephen Waddington, managing director of Speed.

"The fragmentation of media, rise of social networks, increasingly savvy purchasers and the recession are combining to challenge the established PR industry hierarchy. Speed is a modern consultancy that is seeking to tackle this head on in delivering assured impact for our clients."

The 50 person-strong consultancy is based in The Communications Building, Leicester Square, London and has an annual fee income of around £5 million. Its clients include The Economist, ntl:Telewest Business (part of Virgin Media), Tesco, Toshiba and Wickes. The team is led by managing directors Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington, who previously ran technology specialist Rainier PR.

To find out more about Speed check out the blogs, web site, YouTube channel on YouTube or give us a call on +44 (0) 20 7842 3200.

Most Sunday's I indulge myself by taking a couple hours to read the newspapers. Yet I find the sheer amount of waste they create extremely frustrating.

If I were to cut out all of the articles and adverts that I read and found interesting, and placed them in a pile, I'm sure that pile would be much smaller than the pile of paper ready for the recycling bin. The sports supplement exemplifies this perfectly; I have no interest in sport so this huge wad of paper goes straight in the bin. What an utter waste!

Surely there must be some way for newspapers to provide a more tailored news service that gives their audience exactly what they want. Like an iPlayer for news.

RSS feeds go some way in providing people with a way of subscribing to the types of news they are interested in, but I think newspapers could go further in providing a customised service.

Newspapers could provide a totally tailored news service by employing RSS feeds to offer subscribers a wider range of choice. For example rather than being able to subscribe to news about sport you could subscribe to articles purely about badminton.

Using keywords to tag articles could allow users to subscribe to news about particular people, companies, countries or whatever. This could all then be fed into a single personalised and customisable RSS feed that the user can subscribe to and read on their smartphone, PDA or computer. Or they could pump all of this news into a Guardian24 style PDF that the user could read on their eBook reader or even print out.

I imagine this could be funded with advertising or a subscribtion service, but whether users would be willing to subscribe I'm not sure. Would you rather pay to subscribe to a personalised RSS feed or put up with advertising?

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Tomorrow will see thousands of Twitter users meet up at 'Twestivals' across the world to raise money for charity:water. It is thought that Twitter users in more than 100 cities could raise $1m this month. I've got my ticket for the London tweetup, but if you haven't been able to get a ticket or you aren't able to attend the Twestival you can still donate online.

I wondered who exactly will be attending the London Twestival tomorrow, so using Twitter Sheep I created this world cloud to find out. Looks like a lot of social media preeple to me!

Twitter Sheep is a cool tool that allows you to create a word cloud of your followers bios. Or in this case of @LDNTwestival's followers.

You can even use it to find out a little bit about the kind of people who are following celebrities and media twitter feeds. Here's a fun selection below:

@PRWeekTech (PR, Media, Tech)
@GuardianNews (Student, Music, Journalist)
@BBCNews (Student, Music, Me)
@ElectricPig (PR, Social Media, Mobile)
@econsultancy (Marketing, Social Media, Digital)

@BarackObama (Love, Life, Student)
@Wossy (Love, Student, Music)
@StephenFry (Student, Life, Geek)
@RustyRockets (Music, Love, Student)

And finally me:

@mpwatson (PR, Social Media, Consultant)

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John Prescott yesterday launched an online grassroots PR campaign to protest against the £1bn bonuses that the Royal Bank of Scotland plans to give out to its employees, despite needing a £20bn state bailout just a few weeks ago.

Following on from Barack Obama's successful use of Facebook as part of his Presidential campaign last year, and the National Union of Students's victory over HSBC 18 months ago, John Prescott has launched a group on Facebook to call the British public to action to protest against the Royal Bank of Scotland's planned bonuses.

On his blog Prescott recognises Obama's use of Facebook. He said:

"He has also been very successful in creating an online army to support his fiscal stimulus package through Congress - and we should use that people power here."

"We must utilise these same online grassroots tactics to force these greedy and indifferent banks that the taxpayer bailled out to give up their bonuses."

But can Prescott replicate Obama's success in the UK?

With just 4,991 people signed up to the Facebook group so far things don't look too positive. Especially if you consider that the average tax payer in the UK has paid £1,000 to the banks in tax. Therefore the tax paid the by all of the users in Prescott's facebook group equates to less than half a per cent of the £1bn that the Royal Bank of Scotland plans to give away to its employees as bonuses. That said there were only 4,955 people signed up when I started writing this blog post.

I shall watch how this campaign evolves with interest. (No pun intended)

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So 2009 is upon us and already there's been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about this being the year of the mobile web. But how many bloggers are ready for a mobile audience?

Here are two easy steps to make your blog mobile friendly. This script should direct visitors who visit any of the pages on your blog to a main mobile blog site. It is possible to create a fully mobile blog site by creating a specific stylesheet for mobile users using CSS but this is more complex and I haven't fully worked out how to do it yet. But will blog about it if and when I do.

Step one
Create a mobile blog using Mippin.

Step two
Add the following code inside the head tags. Remove the asterisks and add your mobile blog web address.

<*script type="text/javascript">
if (screen.width<=800) { window.location="http://mippin.com/yourblog" } <*/script>

Hey presto you've got a mobile site. Grab your phone and check it out!

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