This week, Rainier PR conducted a mid-summer media consumption study. We surveyed 1,000 Londoners to find out which silly season stories they find least interesting. It turned out that nearly half (48%) are tired of hearing about Amy Winehouse.

Setting up a poll on Facebook was incredibly simple, whereas coming up with the right question and answers was a little trickier.

Here are three ways to get the best out of facebook polls:

Pose an interesting question.
Facebook users don't have to fill in your survey, so attracting their attention with an interesting question is a key factor in generating as many responses as possible.

Be concise.
Your question can be a maximum of 100 characters long, and your answers can only be half that length. So it's crucial that you keep the word count down. Also, a lengthy question and answers could be offputting to some users.

Keep it simple.
Terms like Web 2.0 and mobile applications may make perfect sense to you but they could appear like gobbledygook to some users who might not know their RSS from their elbow.

Do you have any more tips for improving Facebook polls? Or have you conducted any interesting surveys recently? Please let me know!

Seven days after moving to the capital, here I am sat in a dark corner of a small Internet café, sipping a latte, updating my blog and trying out the frustrated writer look. The odd socks and un-ironed t-shirt probably weren’t necessary but I think they add a certain something.

My first week at Rainier PR has been great. I’ve attended lots of meetings and training sessions, and even had a chance to do a bit of proper PR – phoning journalists. Prior to this week I’d never sold a story in to a journalist and truthfully I’d been dreading it a little. However I found it was actually okay and by the time I’d reached the end of my list I was quite enjoying it.

On the first day I was introduced to the staff and given a laptop and smart phone. One of my clients sells mobile advertising so I’ve been trying out the mobile internet since then. I think it’s important I practice what I preach. Also I haven’t had broadband installed yet and a life without facebook isn’t worth living. Some of my other clients include Ntl:Telewest, Dante and Seniqua. As well as this I’ll also be working with one of Rainier’s sister companies, Lighthouse PR, developing their new blog.

I received my exam results and degree classification on the second day. I got a 2:1! I’m very pleased with that and thrilled that I got a 1^st on my dissertation, which asked is blogging the future of PR, as well as a 1^st for the Opus project. I think I averaged about 67% but every time I try to work it out I get a different figure so it’s lucky I didn’t study mathematics.

Thursday was the 5^th birthday of this blog. I started it at 16 as a sort of online diary documenting nights out and silly stuff from school for my friends to read, without the ability to comment. The blog was part of my website, which hosted photos, videos and displayed some information about myself. If only I had known a bit more about web design and thought to make my website into an interactive network I could have had the next Facebook or YouTube on my hands. Alas I was more interested in writing Biggish Sibling, my series of blog posts about a fruit bowl where the fruit got evicted and a mango died from using hoof paste instead of tooth paste. What was I thinking? It seems mad to think I’ve passed my GSCE’s, A-Levels, and driving test, and even gotten a degree since then. Here’s to the next five years!

Friday kicked off with a celebratory champagne breakfast and movie premiere to celebrate some of the team completing the three peaks challenge last weekend. Rather them than me. See the video here.

This weekend I had a look around a few of the sights; Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, China Town and the Topman store on Oxford Street. I remember a few of the places from a school trip to London when I was in primary school. Having never really holidayed in London since then it’s very strange living there now as it half feels like I’m on holiday or doing work experience and going home soon.

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.

Firstly I'd like to apologise for the title I couldn't resist! To celebrate the 30th birthday of Ben and Jerry's today, Cake PR have made great use of Facebook. They have created a free gift (as shown) for people to give to their friends.

In less than 24 hours it has 'sold out' which means that people have given all of the 250,000 gifts. As far as I'm aware I think it's the first time one of the free branded gifts has sold out on the day it was released. That's quite an achievement not least because it means that they have gained a minimum of 500,000 exposures in one day from people sending and receiving the gift. Not to mention all the people who have seen the gift on people's facebook profiles, newsfeeds and the homepage, and will continue to do so. I don't think gifts are ever removed from people's Facebook profiles.

The facebook application is a clever concept too. It's like some of the other applications in that it allows you to send free gifts to your friends. The difference with the Ben and Jerry's application is that it allows you to send pictures of the different flavours of ice cream. Like mini adverts for their products. Furthermore it's sparked discussion amongst fans of the company. People are waxing lyrical about their favourite flavours and making calls for Ben and Jerry's to bring back discontinued flavours. I hope they make great use of that feedback.

Giving away free Ice Cream in the Scoop Shops is a great idea too. I just wish I lived near to somewhere that was participating in it!

UPDATE: Presumably due to popular demand the availability of the free gift has been doubled from 250,000 to 500,000. I wonder how long it will take for all those gifts to run out.

UPDATE: All 500,000 free gifts have now sold out. A minimum of 1 million exposures globally isn't bad going in under 36 hours.

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.

The media ball is now looking likelier than ever after a meeting today. We decided what we want to do and how we're going to go about promoting the event. We now have a facebook group and the lovely poster, which I designed earlier. I'm quite proud of it, in fact I'm that proud I'm going to put it in my portfolio.

I've also discovered Skiddle, which is a great website that allows you to sell tickets to your own events online. The only hitch it that they charge the customer a 10% booking fee, but that's not uncommon.

Have you experience any website's like Skiddle or better? I'd love to hear.

There is now a scrabble application on Facebook. Unfortunately it’s hugely addictive. I find myself checking it constantly to see if it’s my go. My word power has improved too, which I imagine is thanks to the fact I’ve been reading and writing a lot more, due to my work experience.

The work experience is going swimmingly. Swimmingly being the word of choice since it’s been so wet recently! I’ve started compiling a portfolio of my work for future interviews. I am on form.

Also HP are sending me a brand new camera after my last one died in Venice. I cannot wait to get snapping again. I've had a lot of trouble with HP cameras. Have you?

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…