max tatton-brown A New Start: MaxTB Ltd. MaxTB Ltd. Two and a half years is a long time. In dog years, thatās a decade and a half ā in PR years, at the rate things are moving, itās almost certainly more. And in *tech* PR, God only knows ā letās say a century. But anyway, a
Posts Looking Beneath the Surface Initial thoughts on the Microsoft Surface tablets, announced yesterday (read up at The Verge. [http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/18/3095683/microsoft-surface-tablet-versus-ipad-android] ) Warning: There are some generalisations ahead but I think they are ones we can all live withā¦ #perksofnotbeingafulltimejourno MARKET Firstly: you arenāt going to buy a
Posts Google Zero: the answer to the backlash Recently, there has been a lot of talk about how Google is no longer the company it used to be ā for example this ridiculous article [http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embraces-paid-inclusion-13138] by Danny Sullivan on paid inclusion last month.* From its search page design [http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/google/world/] to
Posts Email won't send with O2 Broadband? Here's the solution. Having spent days trying to get my work email to send after getting O2 Broadband, a solution emerged from their excellent Twitter customer service. From a ton of internet stalking, I knew it was something to do with the SMTP service being blocked according to a load of reading but
Posts Could OAPs be Apple's Secret Testing Team? Saw the video below and had one of those massive āwhat ifā moments ā How āSteve Jobsā would it be to test new Apple products on single, old-aged individuals who probably wonāt spill the beans? Who else are you going to sit an iPad in front to do user experience
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 ā 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 ā 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, weād 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 Iād say this after only three years in PR but, come January, Iām going to be a published author. And I think thatās 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 thereās a bigger theme that it all plays into ā for me, these years have been just as much about shifting digital inhibitions. What does that mean? Letās 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 ā 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, thereās no way to skip straight to management. Itās vocational enough that you simply canāt start delegating without the proper understanding of what youāre asking of people, what
Posts How do I filter tweets from TweetDeck? Weāve all seen it ā itās one of those days. A ātrenderā. 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 youāve 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 couldnāt imagine, todayās 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 doesnāt end there ā 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. Meetā¦ The āSocial Media Cynic.ā 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 ādesigner and thinkerā,Youssef Sarhan [https://twitter.com/#!/ys], tidily highlighting simple ideas for how heād improve Facebook. Bit.ly says heās 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 āhead of contentā or similar. And while historically there have been leaps in the opposite direction, itās 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. Thereās 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 wasnāt enough, Iāve 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 hadnāt
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" Iām 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 didnāt count that myself but Iām 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
