Max Tatton-Brown

Posts

Facebook should update its concept of 'Friends'

[https://i0.wp.com/farm1.static.flickr.com/213/451861781_0245fd6060.jpg] With its IPO now public, Facebook is about to enter something of dark zone for announcements – a move which will no doubt leave a void for speculation and rumour among tech writers. So I thought I might jump

Posts

Facebook wants you dead

Back in September 2010, Facebook went on a really interesting PR offensive – including a flurry [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas?currentPage=all] of activity [http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/sean-parker-201010?currentPage=all] when The Social Network launched and the announcement of

free speech

Free Speech Has Turned a Corner

[https://i0.wp.com/www.genderacrossborders.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/silence1.jpg] Last weekend, we’d nothing planned for the Sunday so the girlfriend and I decided to head over to Hyde Park to deride the Winter Wonderland then find something to do on Foursquare. Eventually we settled on

Power Struggles of the Advocate Age - The Social MBA

I really never thought I’d say this after only three years in PR but, come January, I’m going to be a published author. And I think that’s both quite humbling and seriously cool. A little while ago, I was kindly invited by Christer Holloman to contribute a

Posts

The Age of Digital Inhibitions

There has been a lot of conversation in the last couple of years about online privacy. But I think actually there’s a bigger theme that it all plays into – for me, these years have been just as much about shifting digital inhibitions. What does that mean? Let’s take

Posts

Wired Guest Post: Kindle micro-transactions for the win

A little while ago, I put a few thoughts together for this blog based on Kindle potentially becoming a platform for saving, reading and buying content web-wide – like Instapaper meets the App Store. Only, instead of publishing it here, I pitched it into technology bible Wired and it was published

Posts

How will we Manage without degrees?

Management is a skill and a great example of nature and nurture coming together as one. In PR, there’s no way to skip straight to management. It’s vocational enough that you simply can’t start delegating without the proper understanding of what you’re asking of people, what

Posts

How do I filter tweets from TweetDeck?

We’ve all seen it – it’s one of those days. A “trender”. Something you have little to no interest in (Big Brother, X Factor, Cricket) will now litter your feed tweet after tweet, with no end in sight. Once you’ve heard that Steve Jobs is on the way

Inspiration

5 ways to turn distraction into inspiration

Despite everything else that has changed in the workplace over the years, the ability to have good ideas is still the differentiator that can launch your pitch, project or business onto another level. But with access to funnels of information that previous generations couldn’t imagine, today’s challenge has

events

Failure Conference: the ultimate success?

An interesting slide deck [http://www.slideshare.net/Griner/fail-learning-from-social-media-disaster] came to my attention today via @JordanStone [http://twitter.com/jordanstone], which takes a look at examples where companies have failed on social media. But the key fact is that the story doesn’t end there – it then looks at

Death of the Social Media Guru

Death of the Social Media Guru: 4 New Signs of the Social Media Try-Hard

For some time now, anyone who calls themself a Social Media Guru (or supremo, or magician or ninja or zombie pirate) has quite rightly been derided for tweeting too hard. But in response, this group has upped its game. Meet… The “Social Media Cynic.” Now that these people have become

odds and sods

What happens to social profiles after you die?

For a while, the topic of what happens to your social media presence after you die [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/death-and-social-media-what-happens-to-your-life-online.ars] has been something of a quandary, with graveyards of Facebook profiles and ceased Twitter accounts littering the web. But in a particularly poignant recent example

Business

How to write a CV... with your life

Like most people, I like good ideas. So I was delighted to see this Yo Zuck! Tumblr [http://yozuck.tumblr.com/] from “designer and thinker”,Youssef Sarhan [https://twitter.com/#!/ys], tidily highlighting simple ideas for how he’d improve Facebook. Bit.ly says he’s on 724 clicks [http:

journalism

Could PRs become the next best journalists?

For years, the world of PR has played host to aliens from the other side of its universe as journo after journo made the move from Editor to “head of content” or similar. And while historically there have been leaps in the opposite direction, it’s generally more like a

Quora

Why Quora will be a slow burner success

There may be no service on Earth full of as much spurious misinformation, confusion and doubt as Yahoo Answers. There’s a sense of 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters with the occasional answer breaking for freedom with a whisper of welcome sanity. By contrast, I think Quora has more potential

Foursquare

Location alone gets you nowhere

As if making sure @DannyWhatmough [http://www.twitter.com/dannywhatmough] never becomes Mayor of Wildfire PR wasn’t enough, I’ve actually found real value from Foursquare here and there. In the first example, I checked into a bar and was quickly called by an old friend I hadn’t

twitter

Overtransparency and the Dilemma of #Client Vs Integrity

This time last year, there was some fuss about The SarcMark [http://sarcmark.com], a new piece of punctuation designed to make the use of sarcasm explicit by putting a little marker at the end of each relevant sentence.* Naturally, it was met with near universalderision and ridicule [http://www.

Quora

Quora and the big "what if"

I’m reliably informed that every day, Google serves about 3 billion searches [http://www.quora.com/How-many-search-queries-does-Google-serve-worldwide-every-day?q=How+many+google+searches] globally. I didn’t count that myself but I’m taking it on good authority. But what if instead, every query was saved as a unique page

Humour

Social Media: the Talk

<< Originally a guest post for the Social Collective blog [http://www.social-collective.com/2010/08/24/guest-post-%E2%80%9Cthe-talk%E2%80%9D/#comments] , stumbled upon it while Googling and decided it deserves to be here too >> [https://i0.wp.com/www.social-collective.com/wp-content/uploads/

followfriday

The truth behind Follow Friday

A jolly little cartoon [http://theoatmeal.com/comics/follow_friday] just popped up in my Twitter feed (thanks @lewsisshields [http://twitter.com/lewisshields]) making an entertaining point about the Follow Friday phenomenon- namely that nobody ever follows the people suggested in such tweets. But actually I think this kind of

review

So Far With... Kindle 3G

[https://i0.wp.com/www.maxtb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Kindle-front-graphite1.jpg?ssl=1] My brother and I have a kind of gentleman’s agreement to buy each other the gadgets we want but can’t justify as Christmas presents every year. What’s more, we cunningly subvert the

journalism

Does the tech scene need more humanity?

An interesting Tweetversation has been going on between a couple of leading UK tech journos Chris Davies [http://twitter.com/c_davies] (from SlashGear [http://slashgear.com]) and Mic Wright [http://twitter.com/brokenbottleboy] ( freelancer [http://brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com/]for the likes of Wired [http://www.wired.co.uk/] &

Public Relations

PR coverage- a new perspective

As you may have heard, last week my agency Wildfire PR released some social media research which saw some pretty excellent pickup all over the place. As PRs, we’re all pretty used to the value of good coverage- traditionally,  it’s one of the great magical currencies of what

Posts

Playing Games in Business

Modern Warfare 2, probably the most successful game of all time, sold 7 million copies during its first day on sale. That’s 7 million men, women and children out there who are logging hours on the thing as we speak.  But it’s not the only game raking in

Public Relations

Sustainable Social Media: A Manifesto

<< Crossposted from my post on the official Wildfire PR [http://blog.wildfirepr.co.uk/] blog. Because I like it. >> If one thing has become clear in the last few weeks, it’s that everyone loves the Old Spice guy.  He sprung out of nowhere, posted some