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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UPDATE 2 (27 APRIL): Weber Shandwick Scotland are looking for a digital/social media ace. I’ve worked with them and they are a good bunch – and well known digitally in the rest of the UK – so it’s a great opportunity.

Having said that – and this is a question I get asked a lot – how do you get a job in social media?
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The BIG Partnership are looking for someone to join their digital and social media team and given the size of BIG and the fact that out of the large PR agencies in Scotland they are leaps ahead of most, if you are based in Scotland (Glasgow ideally) and interested in the future of PR communications – or want a career in said industry, you’d be nuts not to go for it.

UPDATE: Ketchum and the very talented Kate Matlock are looking for someone similar in London.

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Those of you who follow domain names – and any decent social media/PR operator should at least have a cursory knowledge of the field – will be aware of ICANN’s plan to release more top level domain (TLD) names to sit alongside .co.uk, .com, .net and so on.

And amongst the earliest proposals (full list of new gTLDs here) are two for .scot (dotscot and dot-scot) but canny businesses should be looking beyond that.
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Ever-talented Jon Clements has written a good piece over on the PR Media Blog about banks and social media that’s well worth a read given the recent fury over banking bonuses but it got me thinking too – should banks use social media? (Niall Harbison has also written a good piece along the same lines here.)

Now, there’s a case for it – and we’ll come to that – but overall? Oh hell no, as Will Smith would say (or your bank manager if you’re asking for a loan).

Why? Because most bankers don’t think they’ve done anything wrong.
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The Sunday Herald in Scotland revamped at the weekend and for the most part was very, very good – some nice articles, good insight but one thing struck me as incredibly odd when looking through the arts section: book and film reviews were there, some pages on fashion and music.

Nothing on computer games.
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Inspired by this post by Ben Cotton of Edelman Digital (and because social media types are always going on about transparency) I thought I’d share some of the stats for the Contently Managed blog.
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• 27,589 visits
• 42,261 pageviews
• 39% of traffic via search engines like Google and Bing
• 38% of traffic referred here
• 23% of traffic direct
• 21,451 absolute unique visitors
• 131 new blog posts
• July 14 was the busiest day of the year, followed by Feb 25, 2010. On neither day was there a new blog post
• Most popular browser – Firefox (33%) then IE (32%) then Safari (17%)
• 3,000 visits from mobile devices
• Most popular countries: UK, US, Canada, Australia, Ireland (in that order)
• Most popular posts: a post about the new Celtic football strip being leaked online to judge popularity, What Celtic FC and other clubs should do with social media post 1 and post 2
• What drove the most traffic to my site? Appearing on the Celtic Underground podcast and this social media article covering the same ground

Conclusions

• Celtic, posts about them and talking about them – in a relevant context – brought about 25% of my traffic this year, so expect lots more on that topic and we’ll change the company name to Celticly Managed. (Having said that, I’m not aware of these postings having brought me any new business. Draw your own conclusions.)
• (The real irony is that the Celtic strip picture has been taken down – that’s why I get for linking out and not hosting it myself)
• People posting links to material on Facebook, Twitter and so on played a large part in traffic.
• I’m quite surprised at the Celtic stuff being most popular as I thought there were some great postings on social media advice and how-to’s.
• Posts where I tried the old journalistic trick of creating mini-rows to get debate going/traffic didn’t really work.
• Would have expected more from mobile. But that’s something I can work on.

It didn’t take long for something to be overhyped in social media circles in 2011 did it? Quora – the Q&A site with, well, absolutely no difference to any other Q&A site – is being touted as the next big thing, Twitter-killer and so on.

Now I wish it well, but in all likelihood it’s doomed – and it’s doomed for five very simple reasons…
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Apple’s new App Store for the mac has gone live – it was brought forward from this evening (and I wonder if that was to deflect from this negative story about hacked iTunes accounts for sale) and it’s interesting to see what’s in there – and what opportunities there are.
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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.

Scottish author and programmer Michael Howell has sold the movie and TV rights to his debut novel The Christmas Virus just one week after the Kindle/iPad version went on sale.

The technothriller shows a world taken to the brink of chaos after Islamic terrorists activate a virus in 95% of the world’s computers just before Christmas.

The rights have now been sold to film publicity company NoKidding Ltd for an undisclosed five-figure sum.
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