Aubin & Wills is a high-end clothing company with five stores in upmarket places, as well as an impressive e-commerce site.

Their latest catalogue landed on my doorstep a couple of weeks’ back, complete with a black and white arty cover showing a variety of place names in an assortment of font styles and sizes, none of which seemed to be linked to each other in any way (or A&W, come to that), or be themed other than they were northern.

But standing out like a crocodile at an alligator conference was the name Teeside. And for those that haven’t noticed, or think I’ve made a spelling mistake, it should, of course, be spelt Teesside. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of years ago a, now former, client finally agreed that his business needed a new website.

We’d been nagging him from the outset – as website development is one of the services we offer – because the one he had was a very basic static site built in-house many years ago. It also had 36 pages – not bad for a business with only seven products.

As a consumer brand it made sense that the business should have a content rich site that mirrored the messages being sent via the PR campaign – along with professionally taken pictures not ones taken on a very old phone camera. Read the rest of this entry »

The dust finally seems to be settling on the MP’s expenses saga, though I think it’s safe to say it won’t be too long before the issue pops up again in some way or other.

Since the Daily Telegraph newspaper first broke the story on the 8th of May it surely must be the most covered item of the year, although Michael Jackson’s death cannot be far behind.

The Telegraph really did open a can of worms, and one that seemed to be getting deeper by the day. They really put their collective rivals’ noses out of joint but within hours their competitors, from the broadsheets through to the weekly local papers, were all vying for a piece of the action and getting in one the act. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago I met up with some former colleagues from my days as an online journalist which is where we all got to know each other, and have remained friends ever since. We originally met back in 1999, and had all arrived there after lengthy careers working for newspapers in all corners of the UK.

The company we worked for moved away from delivering self-generated news, which saw us all having to leave over about a 12 month period. I opted to go into public relations, while everyone else returned to newspaper world, and being more settled, they stayed in Yorkshire taking jobs with regional newspapers.

Even back in 1999 it was evident that the newspaper world was going to have come to terms with the emerging digital world, meaning it would have to adapt or die. Ten years on and it’s looking very much like many papers could go to the wall as they’ve largely ignored the warning signs. Read the rest of this entry »

Seeing as the whole world has gone Twitter mad, with blogs abound about how it’s revolutionised everyone’s lives; national newspapers frothing over it and selling it to the masses, as well as long-term users now proclaiming patronisingly “I told you so”, I thought I’d put my oar in.

As with any social network there are those that just blatantly want to collect as many contacts as possible (just who does have the most contacts? Answers on a postcard please, whoops, sorry answers via @wearebluesky).

These über-contact collectors are best ignored. Delete their requests to join them and make sure they aren’t following you. Read the rest of this entry »

The creative industry (PR, marketing, advertising, design etc) has many cynics and critics, from Jeremy Clarkson’s endless jibes at marketing men wearing designer shades while driving their BMWs through to Absolutely Fabulous, and the lesser known Absolute Power.

All poke fun at an industry that generates annual revenues of around £112.5 billion, accounts for over five per cent of GDP and employs around 1.3 million people, and its end products are unavoidable even though we may not realise it.

In the past week there has been two stories of note that have had created major talking points, cough medicine Benylin and pub group JD Wetherspoon. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday lunchtime saw me at a Met Club event in Leeds, where the guest speaker was David Parkin, editor of thebusinessdesk.com who gave a fantastic run through of his journalism career highs the pinnacle of which was, perhaps, interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Not that I’m suggesting it’s all been downhill since then; it plainly hasn’t, but more of that later.)

It wasn’t “look how great I am, I’ve met Arnie” though. Journalism is about telling a story, and doing it well, and getting to meet Arnie – essentially as Governor of California, as opposed to the movie star – meant that David had a really good tale. Read the rest of this entry »

Blue Sky PR’s Richard Hamer spent yesterday being filmed for the Channel 4 programme Dispatches after agreeing to take part in a programme on ageism.

Soon after turning 40, Richard was made redundant and after several months unable to find a suitable job opted instead to go it alone and established Blue Sky PR.

“I got involved through Ruth Manning, the owner of Plato’s People (and a Blue Sky client), who forwarded me an email sent to her asking if she knew of anyone affected by ageism in the workplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s Yorkshire Post ran a supplement entitled Yorkshire’s Top PR & Advertising Companies, which was sponsored (paid for) by the CIPR.

The list (league table) contained 40 companies in all with the biggest fee earner, naturally, being the top. The table was compiled by ERBEDU, part of Leeds Met Uni, using survey responses, various databases and information lodged with Companies House.

Blue Sky PR didn’t appear, but then again we don’t recall being asked any survey questions, even though we rent office space from the Met Uni. But then again, Blue Sky isn’t a member of the CIPR either.

Congratulations to Nick Copland for winning a gold medal in the corporate identity category of the annual Roses Design Awards.

Nick is a freelance verbal identity expert and a good friend of Blue Sky PR, and he’s also the brains behind Motorkarma.

The Roses Awards are run by The Drum magazine, and Nick won his accolade for the copywriting for the website for Seven HR which he worked on with one of his clients B&W, a graphic design agency based in Leeds.