I do a fair chunk of speaking and social media workshops and while I enjoy them, I’ve noticed lately that I’m relying too much on PowerPoint and Keynote and being a bit lazy. On top of that, in Scotland – a country where for many in the media ‘digital’ (never mind ‘customer engagement’) is still a dirty word – could do with raising its game a bit, so this is my efforts at trying to raise the baseline.

To that end, below there’s a link to a series of social media presentations I’ve done – free to you – over the last year or so, covering social media successes, social media in a crisis, social media basic advice and some semi-advanced (for Scotland) social media advice. There’s versions for iPods and computers as well as the plain PDFs. (And yes, some parts may be a little out of date, but the general material is sound.)

If you’ve ever been curious about social media, wondered about how authors, lawyers, accountant, hotels, bars, general businesses can make social media/digital engagement work, then these are the podcasts for you.

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In Glasgow, Scotland just now there is one story dominating the headlines and that’s of the three bombs sent to prominent Celtic fans. Now, as always, it’s being tarred as a problem of the “Old Firm” but from where most people are sitting, there’s only one group being targetted by this.

Which begs the question, should Celtic now go on the offensive and refuse to be tarred as part of the “Old Firm sectarian problem”? As this G40 Celtic site shows, the fans certainly have – naming and shaming anything they see, including a captain of Berwick Rangers football team.

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Thanks to the latest Kindle (great piece of kit IMO) – app and hardware – and iBooks, eBooks are finally starting to take off in the same was as MP3s did a few years ago and we’re seeing great stories come out – of the likes of Amanda Hocking and Gordon Ferris, doing great sales digitally. You’ve got newcomers like Mike Howell and his technothrillers – and then there’s the early converts like Charlie Stross and Peter Watts who have been talking about the benefits of digital for years.

But that doesn’t mean it’s all plain sailing – far from it. One area this is more notable than any other is in digital marketing and PR. And a recent online spat shows how dangerous it can get…
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Great post by Edinburgh City Council PR supremo Stewart Argo over on the social media business networking site LinkedIn that raises an interesting question about the upcoming Scottish elections – but also elections in general: who decides what the official hashtag is? Not just for the main event, but at a more local constituency level?

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Social Media hub (for many anyway) Facebook has announced changes to the site, including considerable changes to Pages that will keep most social media operators – in Scotland and elsewhere – working through the weekend to update policies and so on.

One of the changes means you can post – as a Page – anywhere on Facebook (so, for example, I can post as Whyte & Mackay instead of Craig McGill) but I’m not the only admin there, so how do firms keep a track of who said what?
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A few things popped this into my head: seeing a chap I know comment that now he’s working properly in social media he has less time to tweet/Facebook his own stuff and others asking me at various training events how often you should be online/when you can be offline.

Here’s the modern-day reality: if you’re taking social media seriously Monday-Friday 9-5 just doesn’t cut it. That doesn’t mean you have to be a slave to the keyboard though. What you may need is an ex-smoker…
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The independent PR scene in Scotland has just had a welcome addition with the set up of CranComms, a bespoke agency set up by ex-Shelter PR supremo Christina Cran.

Now Christina has always worn her heart on her sleeve, making her not only one of Scotland’s most ethical PRs but one of the most honest and trustworthy and she’s taken that ethos to heart with her new venture, offering a freemium service to third-sector parties.

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A theme I’ve spotted in a lot of social media presentations recently is that there’s a claim being made that the ever-mythical they - that group out there that marketeers, PRs, politicians and everyone else wants to reach – want relationships. Just as we’re no longer about print or TV content/ads (nonsense) or just providing PR (nonsense), it’s now about the relationship. Content was 2010, 2011 is relationships.

To which I say, if that’s the case someone’s divorced from reality.
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An agency carried out a survey of the activity on Twitter by the top 50 legal brands, published a report on it and did some PR around it, calling A&O the best Tweagles out there (oh come on, that’s a Twitter word mashup too far surely?). But it’s caused, as they say in Scotland, a bit of a social media stushie. It’s already been given the ‘gate’ suffix (and that’s when you know you’ve arrived).

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Mince pie? I’m eating humble pie right now. Anyway, a quick PR Friday funny for you – and a lesson for some PRs too!

Contently has a client at the moment – the very funny and interesting Michael Howell, who recently brought out his debut technothriller novel The Christmas Virus and then, not long after making a digital version available for Kindle, iPad, iPhone and so on, sold the movie rights for a very healthy five-figure sum.

As an author myself, I know that’s one of the dreams so I was delighted to be able to help him spread his good news and success.

Off goes a press release with little comeback. Strange, thinks I. I know some people got it – they replied and we’ve set some stuff up – but others, that I would have called bankers, didn’t. It was doubly strange as the book’s co-lead is a feisty female journalist, which I thought gave it some more relevancy and appeal to the press (as well as being a journalistic stocking filler).

So I makes some phone calls – very unusual for me as I know how busy journalists are – and quite a few say they haven’t got it. Sends again, no joy.

And then one very kind soul – who is getting a bottle of whisky for their trouble – finds out what it is. Due to the phrase ‘The Christmas Virus’ being in the header and text, complete with links mentioning the same (as well as some extra bit.ly links) and my hosting/email coming from outwith the UK, many a journalist’s IT setup has seen this and went ‘no chance is that getting through’ and has done what good filtering software should and nuked it before the reporter ever saw it.

So the lessons are that sometimes phone calls are still very, very handy and that virus is not a handy word to have in a subject heading.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make sure Mike’s next book doesn’t have .exe in the title… and buy a fax machine.