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Our sister agency Raw Creative is looking for a fresh faced and talented designer to join their team and help their small agency grow even further.

They are looking for enthusiasm, so they want somebody who jumps out of bed on a morning and makes a good cup of tea - only kidding.

This person will work alongside the senior designer and on their own, so the ability to see a project through from concept to artwork would be ideal.

The candidate will need a degree or equivalent in graphic design, and experience using Quark Xpress, Illustrator and Photoshop is essential.

Raw has a broad range of clients and projects so no one day is the same.

If this opportunity sounds appealing just send an email with your CV to craig@rawcreativeleeds.com and he will be in touch shortly.

Cross posted: Norton’s Notes

Hi. My name is Claire Field, and today is my first day of work experience at Wolfstar. I graduated last year with a MA (Hons) from the University of St Andrews, where I read International Relations – Social Anthropology, but also took additional modules in Economics, English and Italian in my pre-Hons years because of how the Scottish system works – and no, I can’t speak Italian – non mi piace l’italiano (I don’t like the Italian language) is the extent of my recollections. I’m also highly skilled in butchering other languages – they’re not my strong point!

Despite attending university in Scotland, I’m actually a Yorkshire girl hailing from the liquorice-famous town of Pontefract, about 10 miles from Leeds; pre-uni I made the most of the Leeds nightlife and shops, but also its creative offerings. I was lucky enough to snag the last place on the Galaxy Radio Academy from thousands of applicants, and spent four months learning all about commercial radio broadcasting, even gaining a NCFE diploma from it.

This sparked off my interest in radio; I was delighted in my second year at St Andrews when student radio station STAR was set up. I immediately signed up, and began presenting my own twice-weekly show – ‘The Schnitzel with Noodles Show’ – which was fabulous because I got to pollute the airwaves with my ramblings and eclectic music taste! I was also on the committee, holding the position of Head of Community Relations, where I set up work experience for local pupils and promoted the station as a community, not a university, project.

I’m happier when I get to be creative and I’m pleased to be given the opportunity to work with Wolfstar to learn more about the PR world – social media especially – as my dissertation explored the issues arising from the use of social media within modern society, using Facebook as my ethnographic site. I find the rise of the Network Society absolutely fascinating, and have always had an interest in the fast-pace and sheer magnitude of the Internet. I’ve even dabbled in website creation myself – my first site was the now defunct Claire’s Cabin, which had episode guides of popular TV shows of the late ‘90’s – this spun-off a second site dedicated to the Harry Potter books.

Wherever I end up in my career, I know my forthcoming time at Wolfstar is going to be both a fabulous, and beneficial, experience!

Hiya! My name is Natalie Smith and today’s my first day of work experience here at Wolfstar. I’ve recently completed my first year on the BA(Hons) Public Relations course at Leeds Metropolitan University and am nervously anticipating exam results! (five days and counting, fingers crossed please guys!)

I’m originally from a nice little village in East Yorkshire called Swanland (No, I do NOT live in Hull, thank you!) which, contrary to the name, unfortunately no longer has any swans living in it!

I moved to Leeds in 2006 to begin a film production course at the Met, but after the first semester it became clear how badly run the course was, and how unmotivated I was to continue the course as a result. However, as my parents were kindly obliging to pay for my education, I agreed to finish the year to gain a certificate of higher education, so I guess it wasn’t a complete waste of a year!

I realised that although I am a creative person, I’m not cut out for the monotony of life behind a camera, or sat in an editing suite 18 hours a day. So why choose PR? Well the idea actually came from my mum, who’d secretly been researching other courses for me, apparently “just for fun”. My answer to this suggestion was quite honestly “But what exactly is PR?”

After researching companies and the course, I spent two days with the in house PR team at Arla Foods which convinced me that this was the route I wanted to take and showed me what PR was all about. I loved it and immediately sent off my application to start the transfer process!

After completing the first year of the course I really believe that I’ve made the right decision and that PR is perfectly suited to my personality. I’ve almost shocked myself by the amount of motivation I’ve had- my house mates still look confused to see me getting up in the morning for lectures! I’m really looking forward to starting my second year, although it’ll be weird not being a fresher for the third year!

Being a poor student (edging nearer to my overdraft limit by the second..) I’ve decided to stay put in Leeds for the summer as jobs are a bit scarce at home! So it’s a life of job hunting for me at the moment!

Working with the Wolfstar team is a great opportunity to help introduce me to the growing world of social media and WOM marketing, I can’t wait to get involved and see what it’s all about!

If you are a regular Twitter user, you may well be interested to hear that there is a new tool available which means you can check and update your Twitter status directly from Microsoft Outlook - so no more switching from one site to another.

I have just tested it and it appears to work just fine and it’s actually really useful. Interestingly, it singles out messages to just you too, which is a really useful function - I had spotted most of my personal messages but there were a few in there that I didn’t know about.

Thanks, to Tom Murphy for flagging this one up to me - very useful. To download this tool click here - it takes about 30 secs.

Below is a screen grab of my outlook page and how it now looks.

Cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

The latest research from Hitwise Intelligence reveals that UK Internet visits to blogs reached an all time high last week.

In fact if you look at the monthly data you can see that the market share of blogs has increased steadily over the last three years and has increased by 208% compared to ‘traditional’ news and media sites which have also increased significantly by 70%.

Another interesting statistic  is that the market share of blogs is greater in the UK than the USA: 1.09% and 0.73% respectively.

Hitwise’s Robin Goad cites yesterday’s launch of Apple’s 3G iPhone as an example of the influence of blogs. Gadget and Apple-related blogs sent more traffic to the iPhone site than the traditional IT media.

Another fascinating fact about blog traffic is the diversity of search terms that people use to find them. The highest ranked term was ‘club penguin cheats’ yet it accounted for just 0.39% of the 518,000 search terms.

The final interesting piece of data for me was the importance of Google image search, which was the second largest individual source of traffic after Google UK and even more tellingly 7.85% of all traffic from Google UK Image Search went to blogs, second only to social networks and forums.

The significance of image search for public relations people is that it highlights just one of the many business benefits of a social media news room and social media news releases. Content is no longer being created just for the privileged ranks of journalists, but for thousands of ‘citizen journalists’ who simply want to talk about what they like on whatever user-generated content site they happen to use. But this means we must be much more focused on customer engagement and what the people want rather than what the client or business wants to tell them.

I thought we better announce our latest bit of new business on the blog formally as I know not everyone needs to read our newsroom. We (Wolfstar) have won the contract to run a social media campaign for Chris Lake a world renowned DJ and dance music producer.

Chris has received critical acclaim and even managed to get into the UK charts last year with his track changes, in fact it reached number one in the dance charts in the US.

You can view our news release on this story here. Needless to say I and my colleague Seb can’t wait to get cracking on this because we both live and breathe dance music.

In the meantime, I have added a video of Chris in action at Space in Ibiza.

Have a good weekend.

Hello everyone! My name is Becky, and I have just started on work placement here at Wolfstar. I graduated last July from Leeds University with a degree in English and Philosophy, and I have spent the last ten months gaining work experience and trying to get the hang of this being-a-grown-up thing!

I have always had a keen interest in media, and since joining City Sound hospital radio at Leeds General Infirmary three years ago, I have specifically developed an interest in radio. I have my own weekly show at City Sound, and I really enjoy the creative freedom I have to write, produce and deliver my own show.

I have previously worked for the commercial radio station The Pulse as a weekend events assistant, helping to raise awareness and promote the brand image of the station. I have also been on work placement at Yorkshire Radio, BBC Radio Kent, and more recently Virgin Radio. During my time at these stations I developed an interest in PR, and hence I am exploring this interest here at Wolfstar.

Wolfstar has given me a fantastic opportunity to work alongside the team and gain knowledge and experience of PR and Social Media. All in all, I’m very excited to be here and have the opportunity to learn about the PR and Social Media industry and maybe they can learn a little something about radio from me!

Sparked by an article by Brain Solis on TechCrunch entitled “PR Secrets for Startups” there’s quite a healthy debate going on at the moment about if start-ups, more specifically web 2.0 start-ups, need professional public relations support. My personal answer to the question is …. it depends. Start-ups certainly do need professional PR and marketing advice, but how much and how it is delivered depends on each individual company.

I’ve helped really small start-ups, funded by the founders on a shoestring, by turning down the limited budget they’ve offered me and providing a one day workshop for a lot less so that they can do some things themselves. But for many this isn’t going to be a practical option, because the CEO and founders are never going to be experts and have a lot of other things to do and it’s impossible to do them all well yourself.

Ironically one of the best posts about why Web 2.0 start-ups need PR is by Loic Le Meur, in his post arguing that they don’t! Many of the PR tips that Loic offers are exactly what a professional PR person would do/say/advise.

Not a secret #1
who cares about stories, you can get traction and users if you have a good product

No **** Sherlock. Any competent PR person would tell you that it’s the product that matters - you can’t polish a turd. And of course the users/customers/community comes first, just as any good PR person would advise you.

Not a secret #2
Do not pick a PR person, be the spokesperson of the company

Loic thinks the best person to represent your company, is you - the CEO. And he’s right, which is why he cites Steve Jobs and Richard Branson as his best known examples. But guess what, behind both Jobs and Branson you have good PR people. Loic advises “Get training”, now who do you think should deliver PR training? Hint - see my reference to workshops at the start of this post.

Not a secret #3
Participation is NOT marketing

Well perhaps it’s not marketing, but participation in a community is exactly what public relations is and always has been. Don’t fall into the trap of equating PR with just doing media relations and targeting journalists, that is a tiny part of what your PR consultancy should be doing for you.

Not a secret #4
There are no “targets” either, we’re just people, not an audience!

“Just throw yourself and your product in the conversation and you will see who shows up, who is interested or not in what you are doing.”

But who’s going to do the throwing, and more importantly the listening and responding to the conversation? That’s just one area where your PR agency can help.

Not a secret #5
Who cares about the launch day and date.

Not entirely clear what Loic is on about here, other than perhaps trying to say that timing is everything. PR isn’t a science or an art, but both. This means that sometimes doing the wrong thing works and doing the right thing doesn’t. But that means experience, expertise and professionalism are even more important, just so you can increase your chances of things going right. You can lose battles, but still win the war (with the right support).

Not a secret #6
Do not see bloggers and journalists as target either, they will ignore you

“Take bloggers. Everybody tries to pitch Scoble and Arrington. They are tired of the same formatted boring pitches that come to them exactly the same.”

Exactly, which is why 99.9% of the time they would be the wrong people to pitch, even if they are “friends”. You simply need to have conversations with people who are interested in what you’re talking about. That means far more listening than talking. That’s what a good PR consultancy will do.

Not a secret #7
Do not measure success and traffic from PR

“Do not be obsessed by numbers and results, it is long term relationships that matter.”

No s**t Sherlock. There’s a hint in the name that public relations is about relationships.

Others weighing in on the debate are Shel Holtz (who explains PR is so much more than just pitching stories), and Stowe Boyd (who half agrees with Loic, but still thinks most start-ups need PR).

UPDATE: Tom Murphy talks sense (as usual), Robert Scoble jumps in to show he still doesn’t know what PR is (why is it that when Scoble talks sense, he talks a lot of sense, when he doesn’t - well you go figure, maybe we should all stick to what we’re good at), Todd Defren looks at targeting.

For those of you who regularly read the blog, you will know we have had a friendly final year journalism student called Beth Jones working with us on a part-time work experience basis.

We have been so impressed with Beth’s writing ability, friendly nature and interest levels in social media and public relations that we have offered her an account executive position here at Wolfstar until she goes on her travels across America.

Beth starts formally from today and will be helping with anything and everything - so expect quite a few more blog posts and comments in the near future.

This of course does mean we now have two Beths in the office which could become confusing but don’t worry I am sure the team here can handle it if you can.

All joking aside, congratulations Beth well done and welcome to our team.

“Word of mouth is not created, it is co-created. People will only spread your virus if there’s something in it for them.” - Hugh MacLeod.

Excellent words of wisdom from Hugh MacLeod, via Hugh MacLeod, via John Moore of Brand Autopsy.