FreshNetworks Blog

In my last post, I mentioned that we were delighted to have made the top 20 of UK Marketing Blogs. I also listed and reviewed the blogs ranked 11-20.

Below is the list of the Top 10 UK Marketing Blogs.  At the end of this post is a useful link. It lets you subscribe to a single feed (or email) that pulls out only the best posts from the Top 20 list.

UKs Top Social Media and Marketing blogs

1. Russell davies – of the Godin style, Russell delivers a wide ranging mix of interesting annecdotes, tips and thoughts. Covering interactive marketing and much else besdies.
2. David Airey – David is a self-employed graphic designer from N.Ireland based in Scotland. His excellent blog covers all manner of graphic and logo design topics.
3. Chris Garrett on New Media – Chris has focus on blogging and social media. This is a great blog to follow with many practical tips on imporving your web presence and social media impact.
4. NevilleHobson.com – Neville brings a PR and Media Communications background to business, technology and social media issues. He also published a regular podcast: For Immediate Release
5. Blogstorm – The UKs top Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) blog. Great if you’re interested in social media’s impact on SEO. Patrick Altoft, who writes Blogstorm, clearly gets around. He also contributes to the next blog in our list …
6. E-consultancy’s Internet Marketing Blog – E-consultancy is well established as the UKs leading publisher and events company dedicated to all things internet. They have a good range of bloggers covering topics like: e-commerce, online advertising, social networks & online communities and search marketing.
7. Talent imitates, genius steals
   - Faris is Chief Technology Strategist at Mcann in NYC. So he brings an advertising and branding bent to this excellent blog. OK, so you spotted he’s in NYC, not the UK. But he’s a Brit and if you doubt that (and you’re new to Social Media) then this Slidecast of his is well worth a listen
8. adliterate – “dedicated to providing radical thinking for the brand advice business” I think that means advertising. The blog covers the future of advertsing and the marketing communications industries. It’s a favourite of bloggers, I often notice it at the top of blogrolls. And it’s well worth cheking out this blog showcasing the new T-mobile advert
9. Crackunit – This is Ian Tait’s blog. In his spare time he co-founded Poke, one of London’s top digital agencies . Crackunit covers “the space between the Web and Advertsing”. Favourite post? I guess it has to be Donk
10. Only Dead Fish – Neil Power Perkin is Director of Marketing and Strategy at IPC Media. Neil says his blog is“mostly about advertising, social media, communications, with a healthy dose of culture and design. And the odd post on chickens.”

repeated from my last post:

Get the UKs top marketing blogs in one feed

Just in case you want it, 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. Are there any blogs you think ought to be on the list that aren’t?

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?

Two-thirds of the world’s entire online population have visited ‘Member communities’, including social networks, online communities and blogs, according to Nielsen’s Global Faces and Networked Places report. This places social networks and online communities as the fourth most popular category of online activities, ahead of personal email. Other statistics also support the growth and importance of these sites, with time spent on site growing at three times the rate for overall internet use. Now one out of every eleven minutes spent online worldwide is spent on an online community or social network. In the UK, this figure is one out of every six minutes spent online.

There are many reasons for the shift from email to social networks and online communities. On a very structural level, many of these sites offer inboxes through which people can communicate either with their network of connections (in social networks) or with people who share similar interests or are working on a similar issue (in online communities). So people may be using multiple inboxes – each for different purposes and some of these actually social networks and online communities rather than traditional email providers.

On a behavioural level, however, this data reflects a shift in the way we use the internet to communicate. Email used to be the way that we communicated and, to some extent, it was using the internet to do a very traditional process (sending mail) using this new medium. But as our use of online has changed, we are now not just doing old things in new ways but doing completely new things. We can connect and stay connected with friends and contacts like never before; and we can find and share common experiences and discussions with people we might not even know. In this environment it is unsurprising that social networks and online communities have overtaken email. These sites allow us to communicate and share ideas with people based on connections (direct or indirect) we have with them or interests we share in common.

With email we need to know and remember addresses, it’s very much an old way of communicating using new means. With social networks we can communicate with people directly through our networks and with online communities we can communicate with people who are interested in the same things as us. They allow us to do new things, and do them in new way.

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Some more reading

• How To Value Social Networks? (stoweboyd.com)
• Social Networking More Popular Than Email (mashable.com)
• Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses (freshnetworks.com)

For our first post of the new year, I wanted to touch on two questions that often crop up when we talk to clients about their online presence and how they are and could use social media:

1. “If somebody talks about us online, should we respond?”
   
2. “If we respond, what is the best way of doing this?”

This can be a difficult set of questions for brands to answer. If they engage they fear they may open the metaphorical floodgates and end up having to find and then respond to every mention of their brand online. If they don’t engage they fear that they are losing control of the brand. Our approach has typically been to discuss a set of real-life scenarios with them from blogs, social networks and online communities, and then establish when and where it is appropriate to engage as part of their social media strategy – what do they hope to achieve from engaging and so how should they do this.

Of course, this still leaves a lot of unanswered questions about how to act in specific circumstances and what we’ve really wanted is to have a crib sheet for these brands. And it seems that we might now have just that, courtesy of what might at first seem an unlikely source: the US Air Force.

I really like this approach, for four reasons:

1. It recognises that it is not always appropriate to “join the conversation”. Just as you wouldn’t unnecessarily go over and join a conversation about your brand you might hear in a restaurant, it’s not always appropriate online. Assess when you should and shouldn’t talk and then so it in an appropriate way.
2. It emphasise the importance of honesty online. The first instruction when you respond online is to identify who you are and where you’re from. This is really important online.
3. It lets you differentiate between different types of negative posts. Not all negativity is the same and sometimes it doesn’t make sense to respond and sometimes it does.
4. It’s easy to remember and follow. Any process needs to fulfill all your needs but be simple. This has the beauty of simplicity.

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Some more reading

• Brands can learn a lot from the US Air Force
• Friends are not the same as influence
• The best of social media over the holiday season
• Consumers are Increasingly Looking to Social Networks for Advice
• Why Social Works Part IV: Final Notes and Future Directions

I’ve just finished my gift shopping, have two more days at work and am halfway through the various parties in my diary. There are just five days left until Christmas, and one of the longest breaks from work I’ve taken this year. I probably won’t be posting between Christmas and New Year and so wanted to use the last five posts of 2008 to highlight Five Things to Do in 2009 (actually five lots of five things so 25 in total!)

Today I’m starting with Five blogs you should read in 2009. Blogs that I’ve enjoyed and learnt from in 2008 and that I think everybody in social media or online communities should be reading in 2009.

1. FeverBee

I’ve become a big admirer of Richard Millington’s work this year. He helps companies with their online community strategy and his blog, FeverBee, contains ideas for how to build online communities. He generated a lot of interest in early December 2008 with his Online Community Building Manifesto, which highlights his belief that the non-technical aspect of growing and building an online community is important to focus on. And this is exactly what he does in his blog.

2. Ignite Social Media

The blog from Ignite Social Media is a great source of information and examples of use of social media by brands. I love it as a source of examples and ideas to use when talking to clients and to keep up-to-date on what brands are doing with social media.

3. Social media (re)loaded

I’ve studied languages for much of my life and have lived in both France and Russia. So I have a lot of respect for anybody who blogs in a foreign language, and enjoy reading the different perspective on the market that you get from other countries. ‘ English-language blog is a good source of information, interviews and debate on social media, coming from a European perspective.

4. ThreeMinds

The blog from Organic has been a respected source of information on digital marketing for a number of years now, and is a good source of information on trends in the market. Their Weekly Digest is a particularly valuable read and a quick and easy source of information on things you might have missed each week.

5. FutureLab

The only ‘aggregator’ blog on the list, and I should admit that some of my posts contribute to this blog, but the team at FutureLab select and then publish what they consider to be the best posts in marketing and strategy from around the web on their Marketing & Strategy Innovation blog. The end result is an interesting and informative digest of what people across different industries think and know, and it serves as a good route in to discovering new blogs.

Read all of our Five Things to Do in 2009 posts

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Some more reading

• Who’s getting hired right now? Community Managers!
• Social Networking for ANY Type of Business, but there are Tricks …
• Want to improve your community in 2009? Ask your members.
• ThePort.com – Social Media Solutions