Quest PR MD Sharon Cain is running a series of Social Media workshops from 8.30am – 10.30am at our bespoke offices on Cardale Park.

A light breakfast will be served from 8.30-9.00am followed by an insight into Social Media and how it can drive sales.

Available dates:

Wednesday 12 May
Wednesday 26 May

Topics covered will be:

• What are they saying about you?
• Do you have a crisis plan?
• How are you managing your employees?
• Putting it all together – turbo charging the marketing and business plan
• Engaging with audiences – which tools?
• How much time?
• The rewards

“Really informative course, cannot wait to get started!” Sonia Jones, McCormicks Solicitors

“Good thought provoking overview of media.” Martin Carver, Primeast

“Good as an overview and a relaxed way to get social media ‘virgins’ into it all.” Simon Allistone, Primeast

If you would like to book a place please reply as soon as possible to

sue@quest-pr.com or telephone Sue on 01423 564192.

There will be a small charge of £20 per person.

A resounding YES was the consensus from Yorkshire’s PR and marketing agencies who got round the table to air their views on Social Media and the risks and rewards from a PR perspective.

Spearheaded by Jason Madeley and organised by Leeds Chamber the session sparked key questions: 

• What brands are ahead of the game
• The importance of online PR Versus offline PR in 2010
• Who owns online engagement – PRs or digital agencies  

The lively debate reflected the appetite for online PR and the consensus was that no single sector owns Social Media. (I have seen and heard it being claimed by PR, marketing branding, business coaches and IT strategists – and that’s just for starters!) 

We talked about the ‘Who got it right’ brands and ‘Who messed up’.  

Social Media makes PR’s think and work differently. 

We used to push out clients’ stories and messages to the media in a one-way communication stream.

 With the advent of Social Media we work across a plethora of channels, monitoring and listening to our clients’ clients and prospects, engaging with them in a two-way communication stream – and managing responses to the positives and the negatives. 

Brands are running scared of Social Media because of the fast response required and I urge them to board the Social Media high speed train. 

If adequately prepared, they’ll find the benefits outweigh the risks. See Jon Buscall’s post on preparing a Social Media crisis management plan and ensuring it is regularly updated.        

So – back to the debate – what did we conclude? 

• Advocacy and honesty is key – be yourself or you will get found out
• Engage and build trust – the ultimate endorsement
• Brands need a Social Media policy – and fast response channels
• PRs should be ambassadors and promote understanding of Social Media 
• PRs who don’t board the Social Media high speed train will wonder what’s hit them 

Which blogs do you most look forward to reading – and why?

This post is dedicated to ‘The Fab Four’ – my favourite bloggers and social media experts.

They are constantly upbeat and positive, share a wealth of wonderful ‘learns’ and information on SM – have vibrant personalities and are fun web-partners. Follow and enjoy!

Jeff Bullas – A dynamic communicator from Sydney, Jeff specialises in digital marketing, blogging and Social Media. His blog also features a website grader so you can check out how you’re doing against the competition. My favourite posts include  20 things you should share on social media and 30 tips on how to make your company’s blog rock.

Jon Buscall – A great online communications expert operating out of Stockholm, Jon devises marketing communications strategies. His ‘killer copy’ and hot topics is evident in his blog My all-time top posts include  Is Your Business Blog Like a Bad Blind Date? and Ten Essential Posts for Business Bloggers.

Gini Dietrich – Chicago-based PR guru Gini Dietrich is a top Vistage speaker and forecaster of trends. Gini authors Spin Sucks and particularly love The lifecycle of successful businesses and Getting started on social media.

Mark Schaefer - A marketing entrepreneur and strategist based in Knoxville, Mark’s blog gives fabulous practical marketing solutions and also attracts a vibrant community. My favourite posts include The silent majority: Why people don’t comment on your blog and Is your company built to blog?

In my previous post I described how Celtic Castles had created ‘The Castle Man’ brand on our website to promote expert knowledge.  We then launched ‘The Castle Man’ on Twitter following the great website response.

We created a Twitter background to compliment our branding, followed a few people we knew – and we waited to see if anyone followed us.

We found a company selling similar luxury properties (not specifically castles) who had 750 followers. We thought, if we had 750 people following us and we tweeted a special offer which sold all the rooms, how cool would that be!

Our Twitter journey gained momentum. We worked on ‘quality not quantity’, and after 6 months and over 400 tweets The Castle Man had 180 followers.

The Christmas fairytale snow was perfect for us and further boosted sales thanks to Twitter!

In 2009 we generated over £47,000 in sales for castle accommodation through Twitter which also brought us new revenue streams. In another exciting development through a contact gained through Twitter, Celtic Castles has branched out as an estate agent which is featuring and selling 30 chateaux in France.

So to summarise the benefits:

1. We have 185+ Twitter followers who may not have otherwise have found our website.
2. We receive several hundred site visits each month from Twitter links that boosts traffic and opportunities to present our castle experiences. In February this figure generated 423 page views.
3. Our website receives free brand exposure on Twitter by our followers who retweet our special offers.
4. I have met loads of interesting people, some of whom I have connected with personally face to face, so this has also become a networking tool.
5. We have become a castle Estate Agent!

Twitter won’t be productive for every business. However, ignoring it as a B2C tool when your competitors are using it, could result in your website missing out on some of the benefits of branding and selling via Twitter that we’ve enjoyed. Even as a B2B tool, it has worked for us as well and we expect even more revenue and journeys via this media. We have even more exciting plans for Twitter for the future which we’ll share in another post!

Celtic Castles has been online since 1998 and now features over 90 hand picked castles throughout the UK, Ireland and France. Contact Roger on Twitter at @The_Castle_Man or visit http://www.celticcastles.com

As the debate over the hard line benefits of investing in social media continues to rage, the Quest blog is launching a series of case studies to highlight the wealth of powerful success stories from businesses who are harnessing the power of social media.

The first of our guest posts is from Roger Masterson @The_Castle_Man whose online business is a the leading provider of castle accommodation. Thanks to Twitter the business boosted sales by almost £50k in less than 6 months.

We had heard of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin and of course this was all bundled as Social Media. We didn’t have time for this, we didn’t understand it and I thought that it was for younger people! I also questioned when would we find time to learn all this new STUFF! Let alone using it for the business.

Deep down I was hoping that this will be a fad, something else will come along to replace it. I did not even own a mobile phone, and we operate the biggest online booking service for castle experiences. I thought we could let this one go over our heads.

How wrong I was! Twitter has brought the Internet alive for me again, generated revenue, creating new revenue streams and a new aspect to our business.

The Fumbled Beginning:

Celtic Castles had created a brand within a brand to promote expertise knowledge, ‘The Castle Man’ in March 2009. This would give our customers direct contact with an expert on castles, and we linked this via a webform. We would collect the customer details and their query. SIMPLE. In the first 4 weeks this generated £34, 320 and we were happy.

We set up ‘The Castle Man’ on Twitter because we were getting such a good response through our website. Having researched competitors we thought ‘we can do better than that’ and having the tweets on our home page was an additional tool to link in new information and promote key aspects of castle experiences.

On the 8th July 2009 the first tweet was:

Golf fans, stay at Culzean Castle for the British Open, just 4 miles from Turnberry! Rooms from £250 per night http://bit.ly/166ycp

We thought that if we could build an audience with an interest in staying in castles, we can share our knowledge for free. If this audience reads the articles, some of them may book a stay, and in turn we may start to generate another revenue stream. More in our next post on how we got started and how successful we were.

Celtic Castles has been online since 1998 and now features over 90 hand picked castles throughout the UK, Ireland and France. Contact Roger on Twitter at @The_Castle_Man or visit http://www.celticcastles.com

I was doing some bedtime reading a few days ago which summarised one of the ironies of this increasingly digital age.

The article reported research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, indicating nearly 80 per cent of 2,300 subscribers surveyed said in-person meetings were still the most effective way to sell business products and services.

Around the same proportion claimed face-to-face meetings were the most useful means of negotiating key contracts and many respondents said talking in this way quickly identified areas that needed clarification and brought negotiations to a close faster.

Superficially, this may seem a bit surprising. Here at Quest, we understand better than most that the internet is transforming the way organisations promote themselves. Potential customers now have a vast source of knowledge and opinions available about products and services, which is only a few clicks away.

This means that effective marketing is now often about providers having continuous dialogue with their market, rather than shouting at it, which is what used to happen. This new interaction is taking place via on-line communities, social networks, forums, review sites and blogs, among other means.

But the paradox is that this digital revolution means face-to-face contact, far from receding in importance, has never been more vital. This is essentially because all this knowledge and choice means success is now not just about products and prices, but shared values and satisfactory overall experiences on the customer journey, including the quality of the relationships established and maintained.

So people like us – and probably people like you too – still need to pay very close attention to things like body language, listening skills, dress sense and all the other means that convey an impression when you meet actual and potential clients face-to-face.

Now where’s that mirror that I once thought I could throw away?

Remember that old joke about laying all the economists in the world end-to-end and them still not reaching a conclusion? I often think you could say the same about too many PR practitioners, especially when it comes to defining, and keeping in mind, what exactly our roles are supposed to achieve.

For the record, about the best succinct definition I ever heard is that PR is reputation management for competitive advantage, which encapsulates an assortment of truths HJ Heinz, with its mere 57 varieties, could only dream about.

I’m concerned that this all-too-familiar lack of clarity is manifesting itself again in many organisations’ approach to the numerous and exciting opportunities offered by digital media. It seems to me that too many companies – quite possibly because they’re not being advised well enough by their PR people – are launching themselves into the world of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook without a clear idea of what their presence there is supposed to accomplish.

You see, people in rival organisations now tweeting like there’s no tomorrow isn’t reason in itself for you to emulate them. Nor is it right to take the plunge merely because being able to tell the guys at the golf club that you’re now in the blogosphere does wonders for your ego and makes them feel awestruck.

The truth is that having a presence in digital media is fundamentally no different from any other branch of PR, which is itself essentially akin to any other management discipline. In other words, before you dive in, you need a clear idea where you’re starting from, what objectives you want to achieve, what strategy you’ll employ to accomplish them, what this means in terms of tactical execution, who’ll be responsible and accountable for what, how you’ll evaluate your results and what success will look like, among other key considerations.                

If you don’t employ this kind of disciplined thinking in advance, the result could well be the missing of golden opportunities to enhance dramatically the scope and effectiveness of your PR mix. Take the example of a certain law firm (not one of Quest’s I hasten to add) whose website I was perusing. There, you’ll find a blog, very obviously written by solicitors, which not only lacks an obvious purpose but is couched in the kind of fluent legalese that most people whose names can’t be followed by “LLB” find largely incomprehensible.

So, by all means think seriously about entering this new world, if you aren’t there already – indeed, it may be essential for your business that you do so. But think it through first, as you would any other business venture, and if your PR advisers don’t work with you to establish the desired outcomes …well, it may be time to find new ones.