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

Technology

Stop asking what social media is for

Recent releases of online tools have been plagued by the question: What’s it for? In the case of Buzz, it was criticised for trying to be Twitter. Considering the big question from Twitter luddites is “what’s it for?”, it’s a surprise this paradox didn’t cause a

Ellsberg

Knowledge and Power

This is as close to a ‘reblog’ as I’m likely to get- advice from a chap called Daniel Ellsberg to a young Henry Kissinger upon him receiving his first top secret clearances. I think it’s one of the most important things you could ever remember when scrutinising the

Public Relations

Is there a PR career sweet spot?

A PR career [http://wildfirepr.co.uk] is a funny thing. The account exec role births you into a chaotic world of frenzied media relations and client report deadlines. But no sooner do you get a grip on these fundamentals than the skillset gives way bit by bit to a

consumer

Dell's Streaky Tablet Strategy

An unidentified non-Streaky Dell tabletDon’t get me wrong, Dell don’t exactly *need* a tablet PC right now. For a start, they don’t have the OS for it and in reality, the iPad is also too pricey for the mainstream Dell audience to shell out. They aren’t

marketing

Old Spice: Swan Dive or Cannonball?

By now, you’ll have seen the excellent recent Old Spice ads [http://www.youtube.com/user/OldSpice] as well as the ingenious @oldspice [http://twitter.com/oldspice] followup campaign. But the thing is, as good as they are, its not going to make me buy old spice. And I

iPad

iPad Thoughts- 1 month later (ish.)

[https://i0.wp.com/www.maxtb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/image.jpeg?ssl=1]A few more observations now that I’ve been using it a while. Naturally if you aren’t interested in iPads then you might want to give this one a miss… * Many people express frustration

iPad

IPad Thoughts - 4 days in

Time for a few early iPad thoughts (it arrived on Thursday, ahead of schedule!) Will try not to be too gushing and also to avoid topics I've seen discussed most frequently elsewhere. In no particular order: * Its not a big iPod Touch- the relationship is the other way

Data

Information is Beautiful but Ceremony is Special

Day in day out we’re bombarded with companies telling us how important it is to remove the barriers between us and our information.  The iPad, for instance, offers to put the web in the palm of your hands. No browser, no operating system, no hardware, just the web, flopping

Google

What is Google Findy?

[http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4066/4523721970_14b5e66f2f_o.png]What have I Foundy?Google’s little secret I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t have much more to ask here than the question: What is Google Findy? I stumbled upon it during a recent search

software

Spot If I am right about the future of Spotify.

As usual, the writing of this post was accelerated due to current events, namely the excellent new version of Spotify’s iPhone app. But that’s not actually what I want to talk about today. In fact, there’s a much bigger picture here involving the brutally buzzwordised concept of

measurement

Why I'll always have time for timesheets

Graham Goodkind [http://twitter.com/goodkind]’s recent piece [http://www.prmoment.com/why-pr-time-sheets-should-be-scrapped.aspx#fifth] on why PR timesheets should be scrapped seems to over-simplify the issue.  Certainly, they’re an imperfect system as demonstrated by his stats showing how they are inevitably filled out with less than ideal

Technology

Apple's Razor Sharp New Direction

With the iPad, Apple has clearly slashed its usual profit margins and priced the device to sell. I think this marks a fascinating shift for the company toward the classic ‘razor blade [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebie_marketing]‘ strategy of providing a cheap platform to enable a steady revenue

Public Relations

Maxicom - AxiCom = MaxTB at Wildfire

Hello anonymous blinking observers. It’s time to announce that as of Monday the 15th of March, I’ll be leaving my role at the magnificent global PR powerhouse AxiCom to join the team of thrusting young things at Wildfire PR [http://wildfirepr.co.uk/]. Raising the Temperature You may

journalism

How to Stop PR Spam

[https://i0.wp.com/www.maxtb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/spamboy.jpg?ssl=1] The writing of this post was accelerated by today’s launch of An Inconvenient PR Truth [http://inconvenientprtruth.com], a marketing campaign from RealWire [http://realwire.com] with its own clever take on the PR