FreshNetworks Blog

We’re celebrating over here at FreshNetworks because, according to AdvertisingAge, we’ve just made it into the top 20 UK blogs for media and marketing.

Woo Hoo.

A big thank you and well done to Matt Rhodes who writes the majority of our posts.

Our aim is to provide useful content for organisations interested in using Social Media to engage customers, suppliers and employees. We’re always keen to improve the blog, so if you have any suggestions, please let us know – email, use the comments field or connect to one of our Twitterers: @cosmond, @helentr, @hollyseddon, @peteshannon or @mattrhodes

We thought it might be helpful for us to tell you a bit about each of the top 20, so that you can find the ones of interest.  And at the bottom of this page, there’s a link so that you can subscribe to a feed (or email) that combines the best posts from this list of blogs.

To prevent this post being too long, I am writing it in two parts. Below are blogs ranked 11-20. I will post the Top 10 UK Marketing Blogs tomorrow.

UKs Top Social Media and Marketing blogs

11. Welcome to Optimism – the corporate blog from the London office of Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency. It’s a broad-ranging mix of advertising thoughts, interesting annecdotes and updates on daily life from this well-respected creative agency.
12. PR Blogger – Written by Stephen Davies MD of 3W PR, an online PR agency. The blog focuses on public relations and social globalisation. A great read if you ever wonder how traditional PR agencies are going to survive in an online world.
13. SEOptimise – SEOptimise are a UK search engine marketing agency. The blog, as you might expect, covers lots of SEO topics. Every post is, of course, perfectly optimised (in case you’re interested, each post appears to have around 500-700 words). One of their most popular posts of recent times was 30+ Google Analytics Tools, Goals, Segments, Filters, Hacks and Resources.
14. A PR Guy’s Musings – Stuart Bruce is founder of Wolfstar. A seasoned PR veteran, he started advocating online PR and social media much eariler than the rest of his industry. In this post, he kicks off a great debate about PR being a reputation tool, not an SEO tool.
15. Nick Burcher – Nick Burcher is Head of the VNC UK at Publicis Groupe in London. His blog covers a range of topics related to advertising and the evolution of media. Including very popular compilations of statistics on teh growth of Twitter and Facebook.
16. HERD – The blog from Mark Earls, author of the excellent Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature. Whilst many bloggers just report on things they have seen, Mark always tries to go deeper on understanding why things are happening.
17. Crenk – Dedicated to finding and reviewing the best new web and mobile apps. They cover blogger tools and general internet news and analysis.
18. Spinning Around – The coprorate blog of 77PR, part of the Fishburn Hedges Group. The blog’s full of engaging and often amusing content from around the web. And I just noticed they have a list of the top 100 UK Marketing blogs here
19. The Engaging Brand – Anna Farmery writes this blog. She has has a good podcast on Leadership and marketing, called The Engaging Brand, and regularly pulls out key thoughts of her podcast interviews in her blog. For example check out 10 How to Wow Tips
20. FreshNetworks – That’s us. We try to focus on Social Media and branded online communities. We’re nuts about the opportunities for organisations within the social web. And we cover evertying from using online communities for market research & innovation to driving word of mouth by engaging brand advocates.

Get the UKs top marketing blogs in one feed

I have created an RSS feed that combines the best posts from this list of Top 20 UK Marketing Blogs. Here’s the feed. Or subscribe by email.

I’ve used PostRank to pull out only great feeds from a blog. 10-20% of the posts from each blog make it into the great category. So you won’t get snowed under.

Ranking the top UK Marketing blogs

I have used the ranking from AdAge. It’s the best ranking I am aware of. But there is no perfect measure of best blogs – should it be number of subscribers? influence? number of links? quality of content?  Clearly we’re delighted to have made it onto this list, so we think it’s good. But it’s not an exact science.

Are there any blogs you think ought to be on the list that aren’t?

I was the expert blogger in this week’s edition of Management Today on innovation in business. Having written about the Nielsen Global Faces and Networked Places report earlier this week, I decided to build on this post about how social networks and online communities are more popular than email.

The report from Nielsen clearly highlights the growth in consumer use of social media – it is now visited more regularly than email with one out of eleven minutes worldwide (one in every six minutes in the UK) spent on these sites. This is for structural and behavioural reasons – people using different sites for different purposes, and people using social networks and online communities to find and connect with people rather than just sending mail – but what can business learn from this change in consumer behaviour. Well, probably a lot. As I write in the Management Today article:

When I speak at marketing conferences, I like to ask the audience whether they spend more on email marketing or on social media. The answer is almost always email, and this is a shame. Not only are social networks and online communities increasingly part of everyday life, they can also be a better way of engaging customers. Email is very much in the ‘push’ marketing category, while online communities and social networks engage people. Most importantly, they encourage peer-to-peer marketing, which we know people trust more than messages from any brand.

In the current economic climate, businesses should innovate to stay ahead of their competition. This is a great time for trying new things and an even better time for adapting and changing the way we behave to better meet what our customers want and what our customers do. They are using social media more than email and doing thanks to both changes in technology and changes in their own behaviour. We should adapt our own approach to marketing to and engaging with customers to capitalise on this change

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Some more reading

• Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses (freshnetworks.com)
• Social Networking Surpasses Email Popularity (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Social Networking and Blogs Surpass Email in Popularity (searchenginewatch.com)
• Social Networking – No Longer Just For The Kids (collaboratemarketing.com)
• The global reach of member communities (social media) (thisisherd.com)