Sadly many professionals are now being furloughed, while smaller practices and the self-employed are suffering a dramatic loss of business.

Sadly many consultants and other professionals, including our clients, are being furloughed through the Covid-19 crisis hitting all manners of professions and sectors.

Our forthcoming webinar is for those who want to use this time productively to develop their reputation for expertise, whether simply amongst their colleagues for their return to work, within their business network or even more widely in their industry.

Kelso's Tim Prizeman was quoted in Startups Magazine this week sharing our experience of using virtual landlines at our PR agency.

Kelso's Tim Prizeman is in the current ICAEW Insights magazine lamenting the unwillingness of accountancy firms to adopt personas (some people use the term archetypes) to add more bite to their targeting and communications.

Full disclosure - yes, we use personas at Kelso or we wouldn't advocate them. One of them is called Accounting Andy :)

Kelso Consulting in RBS's Business Hub article on breaking into crowded markets

What do start-ups and scale-ups need to do to break into already crowded markets?

Opportunism is often good in marketing. Speed and timing can combine powerfully to grab headlines and stand out.

Kelso’s Tim Prizeman is in The Guardian today talking about how he uses Amazon's Alexa at work and home to help optimise his time.

How do you ensure a newspaper uses your picture in an article rather than someone else’s?   Here is one of our tips… stick a cute dog on your lap for the photo!

Ensuring you are building your reputation in 2020 - key actions for early January

My latest article on PR, which appeared recently in Elite Business Magazine, covers the opportunities for coverage for SME businesses in the national and business media.

Examples of the sorts of opportunities for SME businesses looking for national media coverage include:

• Being the expert.  There is a huge demand from business publications for advice to help readers (my article in Elite Business is a case in point).  

Google Ads are used by many businesses and can be a very cost-effective way of generating leads. 

However, others shy away from them - some are unsure of how to set them up, while others are convinced they won't work for their market (although in 9 out of 10 times such beliefs are generally unfounded in our experience!).

Because we felt more of our clients should be considering Google Ads for campaigns, we teamed up with Google Ads expert Dominic Renshaw of AdExtra who on our recent webinar gave an excellent explanation of what is involved and how to set up and maintain a successful campaign.

The perils of social media storms have been prominent this week.

At the inconsequential celeb end of the news, Coleen Rooney's implicating fellow Wag Rebekah Vardy in allegedly leaking of stories from Coleen's "private" Instagram made it onto this morning's BBC Today programme and most of the nationals.

As always, the quality media sneer at the tabloids... and then happily sink to their level when they want to. The moral of the story... even private social media aren't that private when you are in the eye of the media.

The GMDN Agency, based in Oxfordshire's fast-growing science cluster around Milton Park, has appointed Kelso Consulting as the first public relations agency in its 20-year history.

The Agency is a not-for-profit body that oversees the Global Medical Device Nomenclature, the naming convention for the millions of medical devices used in hospitals and elsewhere around the world.

Its scope ranges from basic items such as bed screens and scalpels, right through to highly sophisticated devices such as implants, and machines such as scanners and air ambulances.

The nomenclature

Today's reporting on the ongoing and unpleasant Carl Beech saga (the made up fantasies about a Westminster paedophile ring) revolves around the police statement at a now infamous press conference that Beech and his lies were "credible and true".

The problem for the police is that we now know what he said was not true and he was not very credible either.  The key question is at what point did the police realise he was not very credible either and why did they say his allegations were true... and why were they slow to correct this.

Thought leadership is all about having interesting and attention-grabbing insights on the big problems facing your customers.

You could be using these insights in interesting articles and blogs, well-argued reports and white papers, and also delivering them in videos, LinkedIn posts and of course face-to-face in meetings and when speaking at events.

But is there research out there showing it brings commercial benefits for B2B businesses?

Yes, there's plenty!

Do you usually read such emails when you get them?  Me neither!

They usually look really spammy.  It surprises me so many professional services firms still send these out when they would not dream of bothering to read such an email themselves.