Richard Millington has a post about how easy it can be to create fake PR – and has some examples to prove it. His post reminds me of an experience I had with a fake journalist last year.

We encounter hundreds of brands every day, both online and offline. Find out about how brands can build and enhance emotional connections.

The UK direct marketing industry is responsible for producing 550,000 tonnes of paper mailings each year. Is it time they started sending mailings to people who have actually asked for them?

TalkTalk’s upgrade to my broadband service and help when my router wouldn’t connect left much to be desired. Google to the rescue…

It’s been a busy few evenings as I’ve been working hard to get my new website design live, and now it’s here.

If you track your RSS subscriber figures as closely as I do, you’ll know that the number of people downloading your RSS feed tends to drop markedly at the weekend. Yesterday mine went up though, and a change at Google is behind this.

Anna Farmery at the Engaging Brand blog has a nice post about what you can do to develop your team members. She has some good and easily actionable tips for helping develop the skills of your team. I’ve added a few of my own too.

Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) president Lionel Zetter reports a busy day of meetings last Wednesday in his latest blog post on PR Voice. He also confirms that the CIPR Council has agreed the new social media guidelines for members.

James Byford and Antony Mayfield have blogged about the Technorati/Ogilvy link-up that was announced last week. The main aspect of the announcement itself that stands out to me is that much was said in the respective news releases and posts, but it all meant so little – a hype and jargon overload.

Niall Cook points out a story in this week’s UK PR Week magazine – about a piece of European law set to be enacted in the UK at the end of the year that will outlaw fake blogs and other dubious PR practices.

Tracking RSS subscribers is a way to see how many people are tracking your blog. It’s a great motivation to see RSS subscriber growth and be able to celebrate milestones. But do RSS subscriber figures always go up anyway?

Be able to listen, and actively show you’re listening, is a really valuable skill in business. It can help you develop relationships more effectively with colleagues, managers, clients and suppliers.

It’s been almost two years since I did any design work on my blog. In that time the design has moved quite a long way away from the original look and feel, thanks to the addition of various new widgets and Wordpress plug-ins. I think it’s time to spruce things up a bit.

Last week’s PR Week magazine (UK) features an article about Jimmy Wales, head honcho at Wikipedia, threatening to ban PR agencies and paid PR professionals from editing Wikipedia if they continue to edit entries about clients.

Over the weekend the UK had its first substantial outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu. This is the first time that an outbreak of such a disease has hit a branded farmer – Bernard Matthews. What does this mean for the Bernard Matthews brand?

Late last year I blogged about how my RSS reading list had reached 100 feeds and was becoming impractical to keep up with. Now I think I’ve found a solution.