Internet watchers and experts are never shy of predicting the future, but are notoriously bad at getting it right. All it takes is for the latest big thing to come along and we immediately start announcing the death of a well known brand, the demise of a long established way of working or the start of an irresistible new trend. Read more »

When PR agency Webber Shandwick recently launched a ‘crisis simulator’ called Firebell, it made me think about the effectiveness of damage limitation strategies deployed by companies facing negative feedback from social sites like Facebook.

There’s been many a time when I’ve seen people ask why there isn’t an ‘I don’t like this’ button on Facebook. There are some two million plus Facebook users who ‘Like’ the idea of having one, and it illustrates the weight of opinion which the community can create. Read more »

It seems that Google is releasing new AdWords tools every week at the moment. First we saw a huge overhaul of the reporting functions within the User Interface and now optimisation seems to be the hot topic.

There have been a few blogs and articles doing the rounds questioning whether these developments mean that the days of 3^rd party optimisation tools are numbered. If your main interest is Google, then maybe.  If you run campaigns across multiple search engines then it’s important to understand what Google are offering before making any major changes to your approach. Read more »