Liverpool’s first Pride Parade took over the streets on August 7th and 8th, with over 20,000 people joining the party. The whole event was a real success with visitors being treated to stacks of amazing performances including Natasha Hamilton, the ever popular Robin S and one of the UK’s biggest all gay bands-Clubstars.  It was a glittering celebration as the city burst into colour at the Seen Magazine backed festival.

When you think about search and social media, I bet you spend most of your time thinking about traffic, customer engagement and brand awareness. Whilst you’re not wrong, there may be more to that last one that you haven’t considered before.

Brand awareness isn’t just about having a random customer find you via Google or Facebook. Have you ever thought about how channels such as search and social media are used by journalists? The fact is journalists and media outlets utilise both to a great extent.

Search and social media play significant roles in PR and you don’t want to forget this when it comes to getting your project or site in front of them. What can you do as a marketer to make it easier for the journalist to do their job?

One way you can potentially increase your media coverage and in turn increase your brand awareness, is to optimise your content for what you think a journalist is looking for.

Online journalists often have tighter deadlines therefore turn to blogs and social networks for instant sources of information. For example, the real-time nature of a Twitter search is what a journalist needs to find someone who’s talking about the subject they’re writing about.

Which is why Google’s real-time search can help for the same reason, and most journalists use Google anyway to research what they’re writing about. If what they’re looking for happens to be related to a news-worthy topic then they might see Google’s real-time results before anything else. If that topic happens to be something you’re talking about, then you might just be the one they pick from those results.

The point is, if you’re looking for increased media coverage then there are ways to increase your chance of getting in front of the right people. If journalists are now using their contacts within their social networks to find sources, then now is a great reason for you to be engaging in social media on a regular basis.

As most of us headed back to work yesterday suffering from a case of the January blues, the fortunate employees at Facebook will have been skipping back to their desks. It was just announced that their site attracted a record-breaking amount of traffic over this Christmas and New Year.

For the first time ever, Facebook received more traffic on Christmas Eve and Christmas day than Google did.

Whilst we don’t expect Facebook will continue to attract more traffic than Google, it is still testament to the social networking site for managing to close a huge gap that opened up around the 5th December.

We also wonder if Facebook beating Google will become a holiday tradition. Valentines Day, Easter, Halloween? Or maybe, it is just the particular holidays when people have time off work that they have the time to socialise with their friends online – maybe posting a few Facebook comments here and there.

Maybe it is no coincidence that Facebook traffic began to peak as soon as all of us 9-5’s finished work for the Christmas break. We know Facebook started with students but is it the full time workers that have lead to this surge in traffic? Or do we all just feel the need to socialise more over Christmas?

What do you think? Do you head for Facebook as soon as you’ve finished work? Was your Christmas all about turkey and Tweets? Share your thoughts.

Coming to a search engine near you… Google launches their real-time search.

Last week Google signed deals with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace which will allow your status updates to be indexed in their real-time news. The real-time news should be appearing anytime now, so you never know when you could be seeing your Tweet appearing on Google’s first page.

Before you start celebrating your new found fame, you should be aware that this real-time news is updated instantly, so without even refreshing your webpage, you’re likely to be scrolled down within twenty seconds or so.

From now on, when you search a word or phrase, you’ll receive real-time updates from a variety of social media sites, as well as the usual list of search results. You’ll be able to see comments that have been made with regards to what it is you are searching. These could be Tweets, a new Facebook group or MySpace photographs.

The real-time search will appear on first page of Google – a privilege that most companies end up investing a lot of time and money into. The pressure is now on top news providers who will have to update their news content regularly if they want their story to be included in the scrolling news.

This new development comes after searchers began to complain they could not find the latest updates on fast-moving stories.

For example, during the protests in Iran last summer, if you searched Google you would have been delivered the Wikipedia entry for Iran or a recent news article about the clashes at best. However, when you searched Twitter you were shown the latest news from people who were actually on the streets of Tehran at that moment in time.

So now you can see that Google needed to make a partnership with the likes of Twitter and Facebook in order to make their searches more relevant and faster.

For now, you can’t get your news any faster than Google real-time.

Visa Europe say that yesterday, Monday November 30th was the busiest ever day for online shopping in Europe. Over 3,000 transactions were carried out every minute on a Visa card across Europe yesterday alone.

The volume of transactions was also expected to increase by 13% compared with the same day of last year. This figure was in fact a whopping 16% growth rate for ecommerce, despite overall consumer spending being down to 7% in general.

Around 4.5 million transactions took place on November 30th, with the busiest period for online sales around lunchtime and another peak around 7pm.  Over the course of the day, approximately €220,000 was spent on Visa cards every minute.

Last year, December 1st was the busiest day for online sales with over €280 million spent on Visa cards across Europe. The continued growth in online spend is further shown by the fact that spend on Visa cards has already surpassed 2008’s peak on November 2nd, 2009.

Visa bases its predictions on up to the minute spending data and previous years’ Christmas spending trends. Over €1 in every €9 spent in Europe is on a Visa card, making this data one of the most reliable indicators of trends in consumer spending, Visa has said in a release.

On the High Street, the last Friday or Saturday before Christmas is usually the busiest shopping day but with Christmas falling on a Friday this year, Visa Europe predicts the busiest day will actually be Wednesday, December 23. Visa expects to process over 27 million transactions across Europe worth around €1.4 billion on this day alone. This represents a 9% growth in spend on 2008. The busiest time is expected to be from 11am to 12pm on Thursday, December 24 when Visa will process up to 850 transactions per second, compared to 731 in 2008.

Speaking with a Director at a leading credit card brand, it would appear that the trend for online spending is set to continue outweighing high street splurging.  Many individuals are currently being more savvy with their money, paying off debts and saving their salaries in the run up to Christmas.  It is now common for smart shoppers to head to the high street to assess and select luxury goods in the flesh, then return home to find a better deal online. With the vast array of comparison sites, options to negotiate and the comfort of shopping from our own home, it is inevitable that the trend to spend online will continue to rise.

It gives me great pride to announce that last night, Bryan Adams, Managing Director was awarded Young Entrepreneur of The Year at the DLIB Livercool Awards.   

As I’m sure you’ll agree, this award was greatly deserved by Bryan - a true business leader that has made great waves in the creative industry and grown his vision into the huge success that today, is Ph.Creative. 

Ph.Creative would like to express sincere thanks to everyone who voted, and supported us, and say that we are proud to have established long-term relationships with all of our clients and associates. 

I’d like to express my congratulations to both the Ph.Creative team, and to Bryan – a creative genius, an inspirational leader, and a great friend. 

May our dream continue…

Lord Mandelson announced last week that he intends to stop people from downloading music, films and television by cutting off their internet connection if they get caught three times.

Thinking of something else I read last week… in a league of ‘happy’ countries, the UK only ranked 12th due to the high number of rules and regulations we’re all expected to obey. Hmmm, I see another rule coming into play thanks to Lord Mandelson.

France has just passed a similar law themselves; in that anyone caught illegally downloading three times will have their internet disconnected and guess what! France is an even more unhappy country that we are, they ranked 17th!

This announcement has come after months of pressure from the big shots in the music industry who basically aren’t making as much money as they used to.

If Lord Mandelson gets his way, a suspension could mean that parents could be at risk of losing their family internet connection if their children repeatedly use it to violate copyright.

Your internet would only be disconnected after a series of offences but at first you’ll only receive a warning letter and then you’ll have your internet connection slowed down so downloading takes a lot longer.

BT and Carphone Warehouse are two big names who have complained mainly because they’ll lose customers who lose their internet connection. If you’ve ever tried to get out of a contract with BT or Carphone Warehouse then you know how much they hate to lose customers, so it looks like Lord Mandelson could have a fight on his hands!

More than likely though, we’ll follow the French and implement another law. Before you know it we’ll probably rank even less than them in ‘happy’ lists. I wonder if there’s anything you can get for free anymore that doesn’t come with the risk of a secret charge or prison sentence. 

After 15 long years we finally say goodbye to GeoCities forever.

GeoCities was an instant hit when it first opened in 1994. This service did more for the web than almost all other Internet services ever designed, and it played a major role in the web’s popularity. Many believe that the Internet wouldn’t have become so popular if it weren’t for GeoCities.

GeoCities simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML.

In 1999 Yahoo bought GeoCities for about $3 billion, which is probably one of the worst deals ever as the service is closing today, 26th October 2009.

You will no long be able to develop a free website using this service. Yahoo already announced that GeoCities is closing many months ago as the service is no longer helping its customers.

Yahoo is developing other services to allow users to build relationships online. Many are happy that GeoCities is gone because the service is “so 20th century” and we’re moving towards a new Internet with new services.

As they say, all good things must come to end!

Great, another strike is just what we all need. Finally, just as it looks as we’ve got a bit of an upturn in the economy; businesses now have this to contend with. Give us a break!

The sham, that currently is our postal service, has a backlog of 25 million letters already and the strike hasn’t even begun. I can pretty much cope without a Christmas card but companies such as moonpig.com rely on this time of year. What should be their busiest time is now in serious jeopardy.

And why is this protest happening? Erm, because of pay cuts and job losses! Sorry hold on a second, aren’t we all dealing with that right now? Well, I’m sorry but you’re damn well lucky to have a job at the moment! Welcome to the real world, businesses all over the country have had to let people go or cut hours; it’s a matter of survival. You don’t see any of us stomping our foot and walking out on our jobs. If you did, it’d pretty much be the case of keep walking and don’t come back.

We really need this Christmas to be a good one, we all need the business and we all need the customers. In fact many retailers are relying on this time to turnaround their sales figures. Whatever the industry we all need this Christmas to be brilliant and ultimately that means we need our postal service. So Mr Postman, help us out, instead of letting the team down can’t you just work with us? We need to stick together for this economy to stand any chance of recovery.