A couple of weeks ago we were invited along to celebrate the launch of the bag designed  by fashion blogger Emily Johnston of Fashion Fois Gras, in collaboration with leading American luxury brand Coach. It's interesting to see such a huge shift in the industry with brands increasingly not just keeping an eye on bloggers but collaborating with them. With Bip Ling becoming the new face of Forever 21 and Susie Bubble working on the Topshop 'Edited Project', it was only a matter of time before luxury brands came on board too. The bag has been designed to meet the needs of a busy blogger. The oversized tote has different compartments for a large SLR camera, a spare pair of flat shoes, an IPad and a phone - it's a bloggers dream bag! The event was a huge success with a great turn out (more than 100 people) and it was good to see so many familiar faces and fellow bloggers come to support Emily including Disney Roller Girl, Mademoiselle Robot, and Freak Deluxe . It was also...

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The recently reported news that the Office of Fair Trading is looking to prosecute companies who pay bloggers for positive coverage of their products makes interesting news for all of us at Propellernet. Why would anyone offering quality content need to pay for coverage? Our approach has always been to develop content that offers genuine value to our target media, be that amateur bloggers, professional bloggers, or standard online media.  The fact that we use search personas and that we’re specialists in the travel and retail sectors means that we know the key media contacts well and we’re able to determine which sites are right for our clients’ target audience quickly and easily.   From there we use various inputs to determine what content will prove valuable both to our clients’ target audience and to the media that we’re targeting. The result of this approach is that we value good relations with all our key contacts from bloggers to journalists (regularly...

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With an estimated value of £17.8 billion, online sales accounted for 6.7% of retail sales in the UK in 2009 (Mintel 2010). Today, as online shopping is evolving, retailers that have expanded or completely moved online are seeing a healthy growth in their revenue. With market leaders such as M&S and Next increasing their margins through their multichannel strategy and visible online presence, it is safe to say that e-commerce is become a  key revenue driver for brands. As online sales figures continue to grow, fashion brands really need to focus on their digital marketing strategy and realise that  if they don't, they will lose money! Read the rest of this entry...

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On the 14th April 2010 something big erupted in the travel industry, or as one of our clients called it: an ashtrocity! The Icelandic volcano, called Eyjafjallajökull, ejected volcanic ash to heights in excess of 30,000ft and few could have predicted the chaos and millions of pounds it would cost the travel industry and the economy. With huge amounts of ash in the atmosphere, controlled airspace in the UK was shut down for fear of damage to the aircraft engines. By the 17th April, there was a no fly zone in the airspace of more than 25 countries. This resulted in the largest air traffic shut-down since World War II and caused millions of passengers to be stranded not only in Europe, but across the world. Airspace was closed for six days; a decision which was later criticised by most airlines who were suffering huge financial losses. According to Giovanni Bisignani, the Director General of The Air Transport Association, the ash crisis cost the airline industry up to £130...

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Ask someone what Online PR is and the usual response refers to distributing press releases online via a newswire service, possibly with some keywords included. But in truth, true online PR is much more than this and if done well it can have an incredible impact, not just on the traditional benefits of PR around brand awareness, but on the measureable and definable benefits of your search engine rankings, advocacy, traffic and sales. In this seminar from Internet World 2010 Lucy talks about how we've achieved long lasting creative editorial links for our clients on authoritative sites like the telegraph.co.uk, bbc.co.uk, ivillage.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk and guardian.co.uk. Lucy also delves into the realm of media mapping, persona targeting, building strong relationships journalists and how important it is to develop expertise in these areas to guarantee a positive impact on your search rankings, ultimately driving brand awareness and additional revenue. Read the rest of...

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A creative approach to link development will form an essential part of any successful SEO strategy. Using case study examples, Gary talks about how to effectively prioritise your keyword targets and then delves into how you can capture that keyword revenue potential, through a creative link development strategy. To watch the video you will have to register for a FREE account with SeminarStreams.com. The register process will start when you click on the play button. Read the rest of this entry...

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On Monday 15th of March a few of the Propellernet team travelled to the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel in London for an evening of glamour, cocktails and posh nosh and came home with a cube-shaped bright pink Travel Marketing Award (which happens to look completely at home in our colourful office.) Judged by movers and shakers in the travel, creative and marketing industries; the Travel Marketing Awards recognise, reward and showcase the best and most innovative work across the sector. The Flourishing Family campaign we ran for Sovereign Luxury Holidays was the winning entry in the Search Engine Optimisation category and judges were impressed with the results we achieved with our unique blend of SEO PR. In a nutshell, here’s what we did… Read the rest of this entry...

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This week saw myself and Stu Bowker presenting on behalf of Propellernet at the MDHub 100 SEO & Google tools seminar, at the Sussex County Cricket ground. Our presentation gave a basic overview of SEO, exploring some link building tactics and the role good online PR can play. We also touched upon the power of conversion optimisation and detailed lots of free tools available to get you started. One of the key themes that came out of the session was that Google wants to provide the most relevant search results to users, offering the best user experience possible, encouraging searchers to come back time and time again. So how does Google decide who gets the top spot and ensure results stay relevant...? Well Google's search algorithm looks at a host of factors, but particularly important ones include good and relevant on page content mentioning the keywords you are targeting, as well as relevant and authoritative external links to that content. Read the rest of this entry...

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As a leading online and social marketing agency, customer insight is at the heart of everything we do.  Using our unique revenue potential model and persona insight tool as part of a strategic planning phase, we identify the most lucrative keyword areas and ensure we build a holistic view of our clients’ brand, their customers and their journey. How does this influence how we create an online PR campaign? Persona insight is a crucial part of our strategic planning phase and shapes our clients’ overall marketing strategy, but it also determines so much more in terms of online PR. Our online targets, the tone of voice we use, what content we create and what messages we put into a campaign are all determined by the results of the Persona Insight research.  So before we develop any content for online we always conduct a media audit and evaluate this back to our client objectives and targets.  This ensures the content we produce for online not only captures the attention and...

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Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, LinkedIn, whatever you or your clients subscribe to or depend upon, there is an increasing use of social networks for successful PR campaigns. Here at Propellernet, we manage social media campaigns to build relationships with the media and strengthen the overall communication strategy for clients. We recommend that your target market is identified first and then a strategy put in place to communicate with them. Over the past 18 months we noticed the media were often  writing about tweets they had seen and even having real-time debates on social networks that would appear in the press the next day. Also a whole new concept of writing was born when travel writer, Benji Lanyado, piloted the first TwiTrip – a travel adventure powered simply by twitter users recommendations. We already have clients with pages on Facebook and we use the likes of twitter for our own PR, but some clients have been fearful of joining social communities. They had seen...

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