Gor blimey, Mary Poppins! Dancing Bugsy Malones!

When considering some of the great things England has given the world, Cockney rhyming slang must be right up here with fish ‘n’ chips and Monty Python. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, Cockney rhyming slang is form of slang in which a word is replaced with another that rhymes with it e.g. stairs = apples and pears. The Cockney bit refers to those lovely folk from East London born within the sound of Bow Bells.

Any old iron er…how, because Cockney rhyming slang is a living language that continues to evolve, we thought we’d bring it bang up to date and apply it to social media and the online world. So the FWD team put their heads together and have come up with the following. Strike a light!

• iPod = Brickie’s hod  e.g. “Oi, can you turn your brickie down!”
• iPhone = Bugsy Malone e.g. “I ‘ad me Bugsy nicked on the tube.”
• Facebook = Kelly Brook e.g. “Who were you chattin’ to on Kelly Brook last night, then?”
• MySpace = death and disgrace e.g. “Everyone else has left death and disgrace for Kelly Brook.”
• Spam = strawberry jam e.g. “Gor blimey, me inbox is full of strawberry jam this mornin’!”
• YouTube = Rubik’s Cube e.g. “I’m gonna upload that video of you falling over to Rubik’s Cube.”
• Google = apple strudel e.g. “Why don’t cha just strudel it?”
• Twitter = spam fritter e.g. “Naw, I deleted me spam fritter account last week.”
• Tweet = sweaty feet e.g. “I going to send a sweaty about that.”

To be frank, we struggled with Linkedin and email so any suggestions for those or indeed any other cockney-techno  speak most welcome. Gertcha! Now I need to get with with writing me Phileas Fogg!

Written by Adrian Beeby

Will Google's Fast Flip change your news reading habits?

The experience of reading news online is something that tends to split the generations. For those people who’ve grown up alongside the net and and the home computing phenomenon, reading the headlines on news sites is a perfectly natural thing to do. It’s quick, it’s got the added advantages of multi-media, and you can skip right around the globe in a matter of seconds, checking out Kanye West making a plonker of himself at the MTV awards and then coming back to our own Gordon Brown. (See what I did there?) There are even mutterings now of US journalism students who’ve taken their entire course without once picking up a hard copy paper.

For the older among us, the web’s news coverage can be found lacking compared with flipping through a copy of the Daily Telegraph. A newspaper allows you to turn pages at your own speed, read what you wish, discard those stories that don’t attract your attention – and do all of this while slumped over the breakfast table  consuming poached eggs and coffee and listening to Planet Rock…or perhaps that’s just me. A paper presents you with the news – albeit an editor’s choice of it; a website can only present you with a limited amount of current affairs, the rest you must seek out by clicking links and searching through navigation bars.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I enjoy online news and find the immediacy and range of coverage a big step forward. If there’s a significant event in the world, the web is the first place I go to find out about it. And today, newspapers can take an awfully long time to get around to covering a story – particularly an international one – that was on the web the previous evening.

But now word reaches us that web giant and all-round do-gooder Google is trying to address the problem. Today, it’s launched a new way of reading the news online called Fast Flip – a different type of interface designed to mimic more of the experience of flicking through piles and magazines and newspapers Fast Flip also promises more revenue for newspaper publishers by running advertising against their content, something the hard-pressed publishers have been crying out for.

If you’d like to take a look at Google Fast Flip, take  a look here. Personally, having gotten used to the new experience of online news consumption, I’m not sure I want to take a retrograde step. And if you want to read the news over your bacon and eggs, try buying  a cheap netbook and using that.

Written by Adrian Beeby

In an interesting article from a few weeks ago, The Daily Mirror asked this question: is the model Kate Moss using search engine optimisation techniques to banish any references to her alleged drug abuse from the first page of Google?

According to the Mirror, Moss is one of hundreds of celebrities who’ve paid thousands of pounds to SEO agencies to optimise the results returned from Google based on a query on their name.

The process – a combination of a various techniques including spamdexing, setting up link farms, keyword stuffing and other forms of SEO (search engine optimisation) – serves to push more negative search results off the first page of Google so they are less likely to be seen.

According to the article, former prime minister Tony Blair is also suspected of having invested in modifying the results returned by Google.

So why the interest in spending money of trying to change the order in which the world’s most popular search engine lists its results? The answer is that Google has become the first port of call for anyone gathering information on a given subject or person, including journalists who now extremely likely to run a search on it for the CEO they’re about to interview.

Today, Google provides a free reputational snapshot of any business or senior manager. As the world becomes more trusting of online research, so the order in which that information is presented to the searcher is growing in importance.

PR can also play a major role is affecting the Google search engine’s reporting of a company. The more press releases a business issues which can be found on its own website, the more these will show as positive news within the Google results. Issuing social media releases or web-optimised releases via online distribution services will also affect listings. Or, posting press releases onto free press release distribution sites will multiply the number of times a press release is picked up by Google.

At FWD, SEO and legitimate search engine results management are areas we’re extremely interested in and are working on now. Banks and insurers live or die by the strength of their reputations, as the recession has shown. Google presents a dynamic embodiment or snapshot of that reputation.

If you’d like to know more about what we’re doing, feel free to get in touch. Try googling your own name or that of your business and see what you get back.

Kate Moss has cleaned up her act - literally

Written by Adrian Beeby

Even the toughest editor needs some lovin'

Attending the leaving drinks of a national journalist I know well, it struck me that I seem to have been present at quite a view of these farewell soirees recently. It’s also notable that the mood among many of the journalists I chat to is rather depressed at the moment. Of the journos attending last night’s bash, many were already ex-journos, having moved into PR or investment writing, while those still reporting muttered about the pressure they were under and their uncertain future.

Fair to say that what was once the UK’s most sought-after career is rapidly becoming a bit of a well of despondency. So why the bleak mood among our friends in the media? There are a number of reasons.

First, the impact of the recession. This is hitting advertising spend, which is the lifeblood of both consumer and business media. As a result, publishers are cutting pay, reducing the rates they pay freelancers, and making redundancies. In some cases, magazines have already folded or have gone online only. The mortgage sector has seen a swathe of closures, while last month Business Insurance Europe went the way of that great publishing house in the sky. Even the Press Gazette, the voice of British journalism, was shut down this month as economically unsustainable.

Second, the impact of online media. Google, the global search engine giant, has stolen much of the traditional media’s advertising revenue by launching its Adwords programme – and rightly so. For classified-style ads, Adwords is extremely cost effective and its impact is measurable right down to the individual click. Online news content also tends to be offered free of charge. An entire generation has grown us believing that news should be both free and on their computer. Why by a newspaper when you can read one for free on the net? Subscriptions, unsurprising, are dropping year on year with some predicting the demise of the traditional newspaper is imminent.

So perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that journalists are feeling uncharacteristically subdued right now. One journalist Sally Whittle, author of the blog Getting Ink, recently ruminated in one of her posts about whether she could, hand on heart, recommend a career in journalism anymore.

So the next time you’re scowling at some dodgy headline or moaning at inaccurate reporting, spare a thought for our down-heartened friends in the traditional media. Tory leader David Cameron came up with the idea of hugging a hoodie; maybe we should be thinking about hugging a hack. Well, maybe a metaphorical shoulder rub at least.

And remember: Superman’s alter ego Clark Kent was a journalist.

Clark never felt completely at ease in his new role as online showbiz editor

Written by Adrian Beeby