Blogs
Reading other blogs can be a great source of inspiration and has inspired a great many of my posts. Plus occasionally I get tagged in MeMe’s! Example.

Twitter
Links that have been shared by people I follow on Twitter have inspired a few of my blog posts and have even helped me at work. Example.

Newspapers / Magazines
Articles that attract my attention sometimes inspire my blog posts. They don’t even happen to be about social media or PR, often it’s just a case of commenting on an article from a PR point of view. Example.

Out of nowhere
I find that many of my best ideas come to me when I least expect them. A lot of my ideas have come to me when I’ve been lying in bed, trying to get to sleep and have had to get up to scrawl them down on a piece of paper. Example.

PR people
At least one of my posts has been inspired through creative blogger outreach. Example.

I tag Chris Norton, Richard Millington and Stephen Davies.

From editing client websites to writing blog posts and formatting html newsletters, web design is now a part of PR. Rather than having a digital team to deal with the online stuff, all PRO’s should have a good understanding of web design. PRO’s clearly don’t need to be equipped with the same level of skills as web designers but I think a basic knowledge of web design languages like CSS and HTML would certainly be a good idea.

Another thing I noticed when I updated this site was how quickly it had got out of date. Richard Millington reckons bloggers should update blogrolls weekly and site designs monthly. I agree, udating your blogroll and having a tinker with your site’s design is a great way to keep your blog looking fresh. It’s only been two or three months since I last updated my blog, but in that time Jed Hallam started working at Wolfstar PR, Stephen Davies started 3WPR, and I contributed to an eBook about Digital PR. All of which made parts of my blog and website out of date.

Now, I know that there are female bloggers, very good ones at that such as Katya Trubilova and Eleanor Lovell, but what I’m saying is that there don’t seem to be that many. I’m not really sure why this is, but I don’t seem to be the only one that thinks it. Alena blogged about it last year in her excellent blog about PR women. But, unfortunately it would appear she stopped blogging after just three months.

Perhaps there aren’t many female bloggers because there are fewer women in senior roles in PR agencies, and I find many PR blogs are written by senior staff. Or to be a bit stereotypical, are there fewer female bloggers because women are less geeky than us menfolk. Or perhaps I’m just completely wrong and there are a lot of ladies blogging about PR. But in my recent post, I found there wan’t one female blogger in my list of the UK’s top ten PR blogs.

Earlier this year, Stephen Davies did a great post looking for student PR bloggers. This is my version:

Where are all the female PR bloggers?

Please recommend some fantastic female bloggers for me to follow or identify your own blog so I can balance out my blog intake a little. Thanks.

Female bloggers you’ve recommended:
Balancing Act
Strive Notes
Casey Leaver
Tracy Playle
Heather Yaxley
Elle
Emily Wearmouth
Emma

Please note: In the spirit of true transparency, Susannah Wyeth, works at Lighthouse PR, which is one of Rainier PR’s sister companies. I helped develop her blog and wrote about it here.

The picture shows one of Cake’s PR stunts were they turned Trafalgar Square into a village green to promote the London villages to tourists. Strangely enough I talked about this stunt in my dissertation. I discussed how they had evaluated the campaign in terms of how many bloggers wrote about it, but didn’t disclose the readership of those blogs in PR Week. Readership is important because some of those blogs may only have two readers, whereas other may have two million. Therefore coverage in one blog can be worth more or less than coverage in an another.

Curiously my parents have both been invited to interviews this week. Perhaps there is something in the water?

It’s not the first time Davies has helped me. I quoted his Behind The Spin article, ‘Blog-it-yourself and watch your profile rise’ in my dissertation. I think this serves to prove that blogging can raise your profile. This is certainly true in Google. A search for ‘Matthew Watson’ shows my blog as the 4th result, just behind a Professor Matthew Watson from the University of Warwick.