If you're looking for gadget and gizmo gossip then please visit the Digital Lushes blog, which is written by Custard PR and was recently redesigned by me.

Please check out another blog I've been helping to develop - Earlin' Abuse: Steve Earl's IT PR Agency Blog.

I've been developing this blog for Susannah Wyeth at Lighthouse PR. Please check it out!

There have been many negative news reports predicting a recession recently. There's a reason for this: bad news is good news. The same applies to social media. People are more willing to pass on and take in bad news than good news. For example a tweet that says, "My car got me to work without any problems again today." is a lot less interesting than "My car broke down on the motorway today. I'll never buy a Ford again!"

This is why monitoring what people are saying about your brand or product is so imperative. This is particularly important in an age of social media where that negative message could quickly go global. Fortunately by reacting to negative messages and using blogger outreach you can use bad news like the recession to your advantage.

Reactions to negative messages:

• If a blogger has been made redundant offer them a free trial of your recruitment service.
• If a Facebook group has been started to complain that your product is now more expensive, apologise and explain why the price change has been made. Maybe even offer a one-off discount to members of the group.
• If someone isn't happy with their mobile phone. Offer them a free trial of your company's phone. Chances are they will want to keep the phone at the end of the trial so offer them the option to buy it.
• If a blogger can't find any holidays in their price range, suggest some cheap options.
• If someone tweets to say their taxi is late, offer your services instead. (See feverbee)

Managed correctly bad news can really be good news for your company.

UPDATE: Stephen Davies of Prblogger.com gives a good example of the Carphone Warehouse reacting to a negative blog post here.

I've given my blog and website a bit of a face lift this week. Added some much needed colour and implemented some exciting new features.

Firstly, I have started using Twitter. I think it's ace. It's perfect for all those little updates and questions that are too big to be my status on facebook and too small to be blog posts. Plus further networking opportunities to boot.

Secondly, I've used Blogger to modify the rest of my website. The pages are all now in blog format so I can update them anywhere and people can comment and subscribe to individual pages. Plus I have a feeling that it might boost my ranking on Google. Search engines love pages like that.

Check out my site and let me know what you think of the new design, and if you get the chance check out Tom Harle's superb marketing and graphic design blog, Aspire To Enquire. It's a really good read!

A couple weeks ago I blogged to say that I had applied for a place on Seth Godin's summer internship in New York. I didn't get it. I did however get invited to join his online internship during the summer months. A group of almost 100 top marketing students from around the world will be working together, sharing knowledge and learning from each other as well as from one of the greatest marketeers of all time and perhaps the world's most influential marketing blogger. Exciting, eh?

We'll be collaborating on marketing projects for Seth's website Squidoo.com as well as completing a number of other tasks. At the end of the summer, Seth has stated his intention to showcase the CV's of all the active interns on his phenomenally popular blog. Money can't buy that kind of reccomendation.

For my first task I'm hoping to team up with Richard Millington who writes a very inciteful marketing blog at FeverBee.com. We have been asked to create lenses (web pages) on Squidoo about topics which interest us. We haven't decided what our lenses will be about yet but I'm hoping we can write about the microblogging service Twitter. I shall keep you informed.

I discovered the High Snobiety blog today whilst I was searching for a t-shirt I saw in Dazed&Confused.

The blog features urban style and designs, from trainers to suitcases and even invitations sent out by fashion designers. I think this a pretty cool design for an invitation. It stands out, which is something I think all good PR communications should do. Also it cleverly ties in with the company's name, Original Fake.

For PR projects at University I've tried to make unusual invitations and fliers. For Mogul magazine I printed invitations on to ohp transparencies, with the title 'It's clear to see you've been invited to the Mogul magazine launch party'. I also made fliers for Mogul magazine designed to look like pieces of toast, with the slightly clichéd slogan of 'The best thing since sliced bread'.

As part of my Formby project press pack, promoting the town to tourists, I designed postcards to give out to journalists. It might not be the most innovative way to reach your publics but I still think there is a place for fliers and invitations in marketing. After all it grabs your attention a lot more than a simple invitation via e-mail or fax ever could.

Have you ever created any interesting fliers or invitations, or used a cool design to stand out?

Barack Obama's PR team have started a pretty cool viral campaign that both promotes Obama's presidential campaign and raises money from his supporters. Logobama lets you customise the colours of his campaign logo and add a picture of yourself in the centre. Naturally, I created my own. Looks pretty good don't you think? Maybe I should run for President!

I think embracing new media and technologies is a very clever move for a candidate whose campaign is based around change. Also the viral campaign seems to have been started as a reaction to Obama's supporters already using his logo online to support him. I also like how all of the user generated logo's are uploaded to Flickr after they've been approved. I imagine inappropiate images could be quite detrimental to the campaign so approving them first is quite a wise step.

The only negatives of the campaign that I can see is that it is not targetted terrifically well. I created a logo and I'm not an American voter. However I imagine many of the people who did create logo's are Americans. Although not all of them may be registered to vote as some of the images feature children who are too young to vote.

Also the campaign has only raised $520 so far from 18 people, which isn't much considering more than 4000 people have created logos using the website. I think the website itself may have cost more than that to create, unless of course it was created for free by a supporter's web design company. That said, the campaign has still reached more than 4000 people who will probably reach even more by featuring the logo on their blogs, facebook profiles, flickr accounts, msn messenger profiles, websites or whatever.

Tomorrow I shall be jetting off to Nice from the John Lennon airport in Liverpool. I'm away for five nights, returning on 23rd March. So, this blog might not be updated until then.

Au Revoir!

I'm working on a business plan at the moment for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship module of my degree. The business plan is for my theoretical PR consultancy, The Monitor Lizards. The consultancy will provide blog monitoring and online reputation management services for medium sized businesses in the UK. I think a basic fee of £200 a month would be reasonable. What do you think?

I just had my first online business meeting using a webcam as part of the Opus project too. Exciting stuff.

I interviewed Thibault Masson for my dissertation today. Thibault is the founder of an excellent French company named Fashion-Fox. Fashion Fox is a consultancy specialising in online marketing for fashion company's around the world.

Thibault helped answer about a million of my questions and gave some brilliant answers as well as an insight into the French blogosphere. This should help hugely when I consider language barriers and cultural differences that affect blogging.

He said that not all businesses should blog especially if they are, "Blogging about something that no one care about like the CEO's new hair cut." This ties in great with an article I have by Janet Street-Porter from the Independent called 'Just Blog Off!' about the uninteresting Waitrose blog written by the MD about his weight loss.

So I urge you to check out Fashion Fox. It's a great resource run by a great person! Also if you are interested in fashion, Thibault runs two fashion blogs Chaussure-femmes.com and Lingerie-Meets-Underwear.com

This blog and the rest of my website have today moved to a lovely new home at http://www.m-p-w.co.uk There have been a few design changes, which I hope you like.

Let me know if you think anything needs changing.

As part of my group's PR campaign for the Opus Project we decided to create a website, mailing list and blog. Today I launched a basic version of the website to get things started.

For those of you that don't know, the Opus Project is an iniative by the University of Huddersfield to promote creative works and designs by current and former students.

Thanks to Easy Jet and having a good friend with an appartment in Nice, France, I shall be enjoying a six day break during Easter for just £113.05. A bargain by anyone's standards I think.

Should be a great reward for finishing and handing in my dissertation on blogs. I just need to write it first!

Ooh la la.

This poor blog has been suffering from neglect recently. I’ve been tremendously busy and as a result I just haven’t had the time to update it.

After finishing my exams, I began my work experience at Concept PR in Southport. I absolutely love it! As part of my tasks I’ve been making media lists, writing press releases, sending out press releases (I got them to start doing it by mail merge which saves a hell of a lot of time!!), financial reports, photograph reports, articles for magazines and lots of research into all kinds of things. Not to mention all the cups of coffee I’ve made!

I like mine white with one sugar. Thanks for asking!

Venice The Menace finally took place this month. Charlotte, Laura, Caroline, Simon and I jetted off to Venice for the official Croup Holiday. It was by definition amazing. We stayed in what were essentially caravans with aircon in an unbelievably inexpensive four star camp site called Alba D'oro We made lots of friends and then forgot many of their names or surnames. Making it almost impossible to facebook them.

Anyway Venice was great if a little too hot for me at times. Also, we had a tornado, which would have been cool had we actually seen it! Instead we were just faced with sitting in traffic as fallen trees were removed from the road like nobodies business.

I’m now back at work, which is nice but I could have done with a few more days to relax. That’s been made up though by the champagne lunch yesterday. I had been waiting for PR’s beautiful AB FAB head to make an appearance. I could get very used to this…

It is four years since I started this blog. It may have moved about from one host to another and its design may have changed more times than I care to mention, but one thing has stayed constant - The infamous lemon birthday photo.