If you’ve read more than 140 characters on social media, you’ll know that many people like myself, Chris Brogan and others advocate a blog as being a main part of your social media strategy. Unlike Facebook, Twitter and other sites, what’s on your site (like your blog) is yours and all yours alone with the benefits – SEO and otherwise – that it brings. Another great thing about a blog is that you can write as much as you want – useful in a crisis and you want to get your words across. After all, there’s no guarantee that the local press will pick up your release or use a lot of it.

Which brings us to BrewDog, a young brewing and pub company from Scotland (disclaimer: I’ve done work for them in the past but not at the moment). There’s been grumblings of late from some customers about problems with deliveries from their mail order.
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There’s an interesting story over at The Drum about a row having broken out between Liverpool City Councillors and the local press. In short, the council is banning their press officers from speaking to the papers. As you would expect, the CIPR and PRCA have condemned this, calling it daft.

But when you look at circulation and online presence, the council could go online and reach more people than they can through the traditional press. They’d also be more in control of the message. And this is the shape of things to come.
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I am utterly delighted to be announcing ex-Digital Editor of the Daily Record and STV Local Editor Iain Hepburn has joined Contently Managed as the country’s first Director of Brand Journalism allowing us to add to our social media package to businesses in Scotland.

This, as they say, is exciting times folks…

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For years, business types have been told – time and time again – to make sure they have their own domain names and professional looking email addresses. It’s a basic thing. It inspires confidence in who you are dealing with and you’re going to feel better dealing with a pro than someome with a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account as their primary work address.

Which begs the question: why are so many politicians not being professional? Don’t they see how bad it makes them look when they hand out tacky-named Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail addresses?

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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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A thought just occured to me after my previous post. Just as BP bought nearly $1million worth of Google ads over a variety of keywords at the Deepwater Horizon incident should the Scottish Government, Glasgow City Council, Celtic, Rangers or some other organisation buy up domain names and keywords associated with the issue?

That way, if someone was going by words like ‘bomb threat’, ‘sectarian’ and so on, they would see links to pages showing that Scotland isn’t as bad as it was (or whatever the person who bought the ads wanted them to see – they could easily portray the opposite if they wanted).

Or would buying the domains/adwords be seen as an admittance of a problem instead of a proactive PR approach using SEO and PPC? (Though with news of the bombs now all over the UK-wide press, it’s not really time for putting heads in the sand.)

(Thanks to Clarke Duncan and Attacat Ben for a clarification)

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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PR professionals, sport fans and others in the West Coast of Scotland will have seen the recent efforts by the powers-that-be to clamp down more on sectarianism in Scottish football and UEFA’s recent ruling against Rangers.

So here’s a question: if given the brief, how would you create positive PR for the likes of The Sash and Hello Hello if given a brief to that end by a Ranger’s minded organisation. Would you say that they are just songs, 90 minute ditties which have no lasting impact or effect in the real world? Would you argue that if Celtic can keep all their songs, why should Rangers be picked on?

If tasked by Celtic to defend The Boys of the old Brigade or The Soldiers’ Song would you maintain that these aren’t sectarian songs but are political (a difference many don’t seem to notice in today’s climate) or that they’re just songs, nothing more?

This isn’t a troll post. I’m genuinely curious to see what people could come up with in the same way many PR practitioners enjoy seeing other creative PR work or hypotheticals.

(Disclaimers: There is no real-world brief behind this, I am Celtic fan (but haven’t been to a game in years) and wrote about sectarianism for my book Football Inc nine years ago.)

And for those who want, yes, posting is allowed anonymously for this one.

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?

(Don’t have time to read this? Get this social media blog delivered as audio via iTunes or RSS)

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It might sound like a daft question but social media can be very time intensive, even in a passive, consuming form – reading Twitter lists, checking up on accounts, reading blogs, checking RSS feeds, commenting, Facebooking, listening/watching podcasts – and that’s just for clients before you actually consider your own social media footprint/activities.

So the question is this: how long per day do you spend consuming social media and how to do you manage it round your other activites? We’ll put our details in the comments below later on but we were wondering how/what others do after a tweet chat involving Allan Barr, Dan Frydman, Mike McGrail and Michelle Rodger.