Twitter stole my blogging mojo November 16, 2009

Don’t know if any other Twitter users who blog are finding this as well, but ever since Twitter seeped into every corner of my life, my blogging activity has deteriorated massively.

 

I’m on Twitter most of the day, mainly for work as I follow relevant contacts and peers – I love the way you hear news first on Twitter, and can gage the mood (the BNP Question Time appearance was brilliant)…but it is very addictive!  It’s open all day on my desktop, I panic when I see the fail whale, and I’m now finding that providing many little 140 character updates throughout my day is taking my thoughts away from the more serious nature of blogging.  I’m feeling like my musings are diluted all of a sudden, which I don’t think makes for a good blog – so I kinda haven’t bothered.

 

Anyone else found this, or am I just being lazy I wonder!!?

My week in an online media wilderness October 20, 2009

oof! I can’t believe it’s a month since I last posted here!

I had a week of enforced IT-slacking last week as we travelled up to Scotland in Trevor the camper – no Twitter, no FB, no email…what’s a gal to do?

Reading

In a way it’s good to go cold turkey from the online news sources I love, (usually I’m logged into The Guardian, BBC, Times, Twitter  and Google reader right through thru the day) but I still needed my news fix so The Times was purchased each day and for once, I had time to forage through the whole paper, including reading features from start to end, doing the crossie (with help from The Hub) and even reading sports articles on cricket. What a total treat!!

Fiction wise I got through The Reader - not seen the film but the book was really compelling. Meanwhile the Hub tucked into two Famous Five stories (having rediscovering these on honeymoon) and we discovered that actually the famous five mostly spend their time eating and drinking ginger beer.  In years to come, I reckon Julian and Ann will grow into the obese, slightly sweaty and red-wine drinking detectives that we’re all so much more used to.

I also got a copy of Easy Living for some light amusement but did no more than flick through it as we were chatting away to mates we stayed with over the week rather than getting stuck into reading.

Watching

From Scotland we made it to Carlisle where my sis has the very ace wine store Corkscrew Wines.  Apart from some indulging in some Sky Plus viewing the highlight of which was Takeshi’s Castle – Sis and her Boy had NEVER SEEN this TV wonder – that was pretty much it for TV viewing for the week.   Actually I also recall we watched the unbelievably good Leicester v Osprey’s Heineken Cup game which our lovely Scottish hosts had recorded for us – absolutely brilliant, and I’m not even a Leicester fan.

Listening

With all that time in the van (seriously, it takes a loooong time to get to Scotland in Trevor), we took in a lot of Radio Two and disappointingly it was Mayo filling in for Chris Evans, so drivetime was lacklustre for me.  Aside from the rad, we also got through the Noisette’s album, the Phar Cyde cd belonging to the Hub and some Led Zepplin just to balance it all out.

Our final destination in the van was to friends in Birmingham and we had some ace retro music going on (ok, not that retro) – Inspiral Carpets, The Cardigans and other random brit pop stuff. Brill accompaniment to our hosts’ baking efforts in cookies…cakes..breads…mmmm.  This week I’m aiming to get the MP3 on with some serious work-out podcasts from Dr Bob!!

And online?

best butcher in the world on telly! September 15, 2009

currently watching Come Dine with Me, which is in Northampton this week. Unfortunately tonight’s host is a bit irritating; but on the plus side he’s just selected his meat from Arthur Longland butcher in Northampton.  I can verify, this is the best butcher ever with great proper job service and banter.

Good choice!

Courting controversy? Moi? January 31, 2009

the beans shall no more be spilt

You might have noticed that I took a blog post down. I’m not one to court controversy, but it seems that I certainly headed that way with a certain posting!!

 

Wanting an easy life, I didn’t fancy my day in court – put it that way…

 

BTW, thanks to all my blogger buds and media-savvy pals for the advice and support.  Some of you wanted me to adopt a more bullish approach than I have done.   Maybe I’ll muse over it all one day once the dust has settled…

 

Hat tip to my pal for the pic!

Professional/private – going public? January 26, 2009

I’ve been dabbling in social media for a wee while now, having a well established FB account, a relatively well developed blog and an active tweet-life.

 

I was musing this morning whether it’s harder to keep your professional life separate from your private life in this day and age of blurred online boundaries. My FB account is strictly for fun and only trusted colleagues are my mates on there. There’s no way I’d want the great and the good of my corporate world to see some of the pics on my profile!

 

My blog is more personal than professional, although I do put some media and PR related thoughts on here from time to time. I tend to use my mum as a moral compass for my blog.  I don’t post up anything that I think would offend or shock my mum – and although this kind of gives me confidence that my blog is not disturbing or potentially harmful to my reputation, I still hardly ever post links directing people to it from Twitter.  I love Twitter, but I’m not sure my professional contacts (of which there’s quite a few on Twitter) would appreciate reading in depth about me making marmalade, planning my wedding or slagging off a rugby ref.
Or would they?

 

My tweeting is the arena where the professional/private line becomes blurry.  It’s a complete mixture.  One moment I could be revealing that I am 33% fat (according to Boots machine), the next moment putting up a tweet about OU BBC programmes or a press release I’m working on.  Musing about it from a professional point of view, I kinda like to think that people following me (some journos, colleagues, PR people and then some randoms, including Will Carling) like to see a mix of my day job activities, plus a bit of detail which indicates what I’m like as a person. It can’t hurt to show fellow twitterers a bit of myself as well as using it for work related activities, surely?  In fact, I think going purely professional on Twitter can be a mistake, as journalistic tweeters then see you as solely exploiting it to push out PR puff. 

 

But you have to be mindful of what you are doing work-related on Twitter too – god forbid I ever end up on this site . Twitter’s a useful tool for keeping track of what your key journalists are up to and working on, which could give you some leads - but I can’t see journalists much appreciating tonnes of 140 character pitches from PR people in return; for that, I favour the old fashioned phone/email option.  I can see why companies use it too, as a customer service extension - it can be a cracking way to rapidly respond to a pressing issue.  I’ve signed up to twilerts for this reason, so at least twice daily I can see what references there are to the OU on Twitter.

 

So back to whether Twitter should be a solely professional or public thing, I did a quick straw poll,

 …one of the first responses, from @sclater was along my lines of thinking, that it should be a blend of professional, private and PR.  My buddy @alisonwaller thinks otherwise, that Twitter should be professional and facebook private.  @liamgh had a good point, that if you reveal your ‘private’ life on twitter as well as talking shop, people may be more likely to trust you – that’d be an interesting idea to explore more – and @guyweb noted that zero personality is not a good selling point on Twitter.

 

I think that gets to the nub of it for me.  In order to tweet with personality and keep your followers, you need to get interest in yourself as well as in your company/product etc.  Being human and having a conversation rather than pushing out information and PR materials is the way forward.

 

My followers can therefore expect more body fat updates in future tweets!!

Is the economy biting – or just nibbling a bit…? January 13, 2009

I concur with my buddy Robyn’s view, that no news is good news – she’s a journo, so she should know.  Cocooned in my house for the past 8 days, I’ve had ample chance to devour the papers and tune into breakfast, lunch and 6pm bulletins – as a media relations officer, I probably should be as well – but I’ve barely managed to read T2 this past week and have positively avoided the tv news by sticking to my SATC dvd diet – the only time I have read a paper from cover to cover was whilst I was waiting to get the nod to leave hospital and desperately trying to avoid chatting to the man who wanted to talk all the time.  Deep breath – that was a long sentence.  

 

I’m not sure what my reason for avoiding the news is at the moment, usually I’m drowning in it at work with RSS feeds, daily emails and BBC News as my homepage, maybe I’m just enjoying the break and indulging in other things – like wedding planning and today, making marmalade! 

 

Through the haze of seville orange steam, I can see that the economy is all over the place, and yes although money and numbers and jobs are important, I’m kinda not *really* interested – maybe that’s a reason for my current news-avoidance. That sounds bad though – I am interested when it affects me, and this is how I’ve been affected by the downturn so far:

 - mortgage payments on all our properties have gone down – good times

- Nissan, who The Boy works for, announced job cuts  - bad times

 - Our honeymoon may now be a tour of the south coast of England in the camper van, rather than a trip to Ireland, cos of the Euro.  Or, it might be in a car park near the wedding, if The Boy doesn’t get it moving:

Trevor the van

 - Slight upturn in our thriftyness in the household, I would say (cheaper meals, less eating/drinking out, no weekends away for a while)

But, like Robyn, I haven’t yet been massively affected by the downturn.  I know of people who have lost their jobs and seriously hope that neither mine or The Boy’s are in real jeopardy yet.  But I remember my Dad getting redundant when we were kids (I loved it actually, because he was at home and had time to make our sarnies for packed lunch – important, cos he cut sandwiches into triangles, I tell you, not squares like Mother did) – we, as a family of six, survived that.  Recessions do end, jobs emerge, people get through it by not buying massive plasma tvs on credit and instead, scrimping a bit.  I may have a less postitive view if redundancy ever comes my way, but at the moment, I’m not too worried.

 

This is all of course in the context of spending a heck of a lorra cash on The Big Day later this year. We’re lucky, both sets of parents are chucking us a few quid, and we’re being creative and bargain hunting wherever we can (yesterday’s good finds were 150 candles for less than 50p each, and terracotta pots for table centres for £1.50 each, hooopla!!).  We’re also taking advantage of people we know with talents – Dad bakes cakes, mate does flowers, sister has a wine shop – all good. 

Like thousands of others, I subscribe to the Moneysavingexpert email update and this week, I actually got time to read it properly and take advantage of some stuff.  Usually I skim read and delete as I know I won’t get time to get round to following his advice and leads.  This week, being incarcerated at home recovering, I’ve had time to research and write to my banks to ask for unfair charges to be repaid (only £30 from if.com – but better in my account than theirs – and awaiting info from Alliance and Leicester), and I’ve managed to get 90 photo prints free from Jessops as well, which I never would have done if I was on my usual routine of flying in and out of the house, stuffing food down my gob and then sweating it out with exercise (I’m banned from exercise for 2 weeks. It’s doing my nut).

 

Who knows what 2009 will bring?  The certainty, despite any economic doom, is that I’m gonna get a husband, hopefully a camper van that works, I’ll be tucking into home-made marmalade and will continue having great times with my good pals – now, that can’t be bad, eh?

PR Week v Marketing Week September 2, 2008

I don't look this miserable when I read, btw!

The debate over which of these titles is better has been raging in our office this week. OK, the ‘rage’ statement was a bit full on.  It was mentioned in a meeting I was in and I must admit my eyebrows were raised somewhat when someone proclaimed that PR week was little more than a comic and Marketing Week is where it’s at.

I’m a regular PR week reader not just because I get it through my door each Friday thanks to my CIPR subscription.  Yes, there are a lot of ’so and so agency has done this’ pieces, (isn’t it important to keep track of what’s happening here though?), but there’s also some good opinion pieces, political angles and profiles in my view.  I always read Ian Monk and the Editor’s piece and I also like the ‘Flack’ section at the back.   Sometimes there’s good features too – there was one a while ago on crisis comms which I thought was dead useful.

But now I’m fearful that I’m behind the times and everyone’s now reading Marketing Week instead (I’ve read it once or twice ages ago, and found it mega dull).  Am I missing something?  New resolution for September is to read both mags, and then decide which I find most useful at the end of the month.  That’s assuming I have time to read them both, of course…

Off the CASE August 30, 2008

Got back yesterday from the CASE 2008 conference, which is a three day fest of info, ideas and presentations for people working in alumni, comms, fundraising and development in the HE sector.  It was an oooofing packed few days and I’m still feeling utterly brain drained and slightly achy from Thursday night’s dance fest.

There’s loads I’ve picked up, some good and bad, and I’ll post the serious stuff on our worky blog, so on this one I’ll focus on the world outside the conference presentations…

1. Going with 2 ace gals from work meant for a week of hilarity (mostly hysteria due to tiredness but, all the same, we larfed a lorra!).  Also, Brighton brought out our clumsy side – falling off kerbs, up steps, off coffee area platforms, down stairs – I think we managed to cover every eventuality where a trip could occur.

2. Why most people were in smart dress when the invite clearly said ‘casual’ was beyond me. Stop trying to show off, and put your jeans on.

3. Tuesday’s reception at Brighton Dome was hilarious, mostly because there was free wine, and the tropical theme involved throwing beach balls round.  On it’s own, a good PR concept.  With balls raining down, clattering into people’s drinks and the sound of smashing glasses resounding throughout the venue, a moment of pure comedy.

4.  Hot buffets. Stop them. Everywhere you turned it was hot food. I just want a sarnie or salad and fruit at lunch, not noodles, nor anything that will increase my muffin toppage further!

5. Seaside venue = good times.  Fresh air and the chance for a dip in the sea on the Friday morning, the best hangover cure known to man.  I managed to dive in pretty swiftly, which was the right thing to do cos the pebbles hurt your feet.  Robyn discovered this pain as well and instead of plunging in, chose instead to play statues, holding her pose knee high in water and finally releasing a blood curdling shriek when dunked.  The lifeguard ignored us. Probably best. Next year’s do is at Liverpool and I feel the water will be slightly chillier (more shrieking no doubt will ensue).

6. The peg game was a superb ice breaker.  Take a room full of pissed up HE people.  Add some cheesy music.  Sprinkle in a lorra more wine.  Then, introduce a peg and you have a hilarious, challenging game involving everyone of all levels and ages.  Hats off to Slingers who randomly had a peg in her bag. My highlight was pegging the eminent Peter Slee.

7. I’m going to sneak in a last highlight which actually is conference related and that’s just to note that Professor Tara Brabazon was the best speaker by far.  Completely engaging, sometimes in a slightly scary way, utterly bonkers – but brilliant.  She knows her stuff. And she has good shoes too.

I’m too tired still to recount any more, as is Ellie and most other delegates I’d imagine (although Mike had the energy to blog from CASE, and attend brekkie dos. What’s that all about!!). 

 

I now have urgent weeding to do around our broccoli and curly kale and more tomatoes than I would care for.  The garden calls!

53/100 July 21, 2008

Stumbled across this blog today and it’s a great read. Being in PR, I particularly liked this post from the other side of the fence. Welcome to my world!

Anyhoo, although I’ve already done ‘my week in media‘ Meme, I’m an avid reader and liked the idea of doing a book list related one. So here goes!

Here’s what you do:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.

4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 [Pride and Prejudice] – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 [Little Women] – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 [Rebecca] – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 [Anna Karenina] – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 [Emma] – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 MISSING
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 [Sense and Sensibility] – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (on my book club’s list!)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 [The Faraway Tree Collection] – Enid Blyton
91 [Heart of Darkness] – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

My score: 53/100

I’m quite disappointed with that, being an English Lit grad and all – although perhaps it reveals that I subconsciously lean towards female-focused literature; from Emma to Bridget.  New reading resolution – be more cerebral and stop reading chick lit!

OK, passing this on now to Robyn, Casey, Jude.

The Apprentice: You’re Vile! April 3, 2008

The Apprentice seems to bring out the very worst in awful people . What a beeeatch Jenny is proving to be, although I did laugh throughout at her truly rank neckerchief fashion statements.  Brilliant telly.

But, if I was Lucinda, I’d have slapped the cow.  Imagine what a cat fight would do for the ratings!