What? For the first time in a week, search demand for Gordon Brown has crept above David Cameron:

Not since the 22nd March, when Gordon trumped Cameron’s baby with his super fast broadband and Institute of Web Science announcement has there been such a result for Labour online. When this happened last time, the Tories bought up the traffic using ‘Gordon Brown’ Adword banners. The reason? Well Google Insights suggests that the related search terms for both candidates are now very different. With many supporting related terms such as ‘Samantha Cameron’ and ‘David Cameron Wiki’, it seems like Cameron story online is multifaceted:

However, if you drag down to the Brown pull down you will notice that results are currently reliant on one very powerful related term – ‘Tony Blair’. So how powerful is Tony Blair online? Well even though he has been out of office for years he still generates more interest than Nick Clegg in total:

As with any campaign or brand becoming tied too closely to a celebrity the risk is high. On the other hand, if the increased interest is enough to make the Tories rethink their online campaign it might be worth it…

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If you tend to think you should work to live, not live to work, then Kingston upon Thames might just be the place for you. Travelling out of London’s stressful city centre you’ll be guaranteed a seat on the morning commute; why not grab a coffee, catch-up on the day’s news, or just relax before you reach the office? Like the sound of going against the flow, then read on…

Lively social scene

As the name suggests, Kingston sits on the bank of the River Thames and has a bustling social scene in the summer months. Pubs and bars line the river, with the charming Boater’s pub, one of Time Out’s ‘hidden gems’ of London, tucked away in Canbury Gardens. And the town’s entertainment credentials don’t stop with the bustling pub and bar scene. Five nightclubs cater for all tastes, and several live music venues including the Grey Horse and The Mill play host to regular open-mike nights during the week.

The modern Rotunda complex houses a large bowling alley, multiplex cinema and choice of international restaurants. And summer picnics at lunchtime are never far from reach, with the Fairfield park just a short stroll from the office.

Shopping to rival the West End

The pedestrianised town centre attracts shoppers from far and wide with hundreds of shops and restaurants, two large department stores and a major shopping centre, The Bentall Centre, at its heart. Whether you’re looking for luxury designer stores, high street favourites, or marketplace bargains, Kingston’s shops feature the best of London without the city hassle. And with late night opening every Thursday, a trip to the shops after work is always on the cards. Not to be missed are the daily fruit market, the renowned Clock’s Sandwiches, or a trip to Harrington’s old-fashioned sweet shop.

A hidden gem for culture vultures

Once the royal stomping ground of ancient Saxon kings, Kingston has not forgotten its cultural and historical roots with the 2008 opening of the Rose Theatre. Recently the host of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ featuring Dame Judi Dench, the theatre has attracted critical acclaim for its past productions, not to mention the Comedy Store nights- a staff favourite. Kingston’s cosmopolitan style hasn’t gone amiss with city urbanites either, who dominate the town and swiftly attracted the sights of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver who opened the fashionable Jamie’s Italian in the centre of town.

Convenient transport links leave London Waterloo just 30 minutes away by train, with the trendy hotspots of Richmond and Wimbledon just around the corner. Haven’t heard of Kingston upon Thames before- where have you been?

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It’s taken a while but the fashion industry has finally woken up to the wonders of the World Wide Web! Online stores such as ASOS are booming, fashion designers are tweeting like there’s no tomorrow and the majority of high-street retailers now have some form of blog to keep consumers up to date with fashion news and trends.

Innovative brands such as ASOS have leaped ahead and successfully created platforms which allow users (43,000 visitors per month) to interact with each other and build their own community.  The ‘my fashion my way’ and ‘Saturday night style’ sections, as well as the ‘share your outfit’ group spark conversations and encourage members to share their own ideas, tips and insights.

River Island has also responded to this growing trend with Style Insider, an editorial and community site. Attracting 27,000 unique UK visitors a month, much of the site is written by the creative forces behind the brand – clothes, shoe and accessory designers. This makes the content compelling, relevant and appealing to those interested and involved in fashion and the brand itself.

And it’s not just the fashion brands and designers that are harnessing the power of social media platforms to speak directly to fans of fashion. Fashion magazines have also joined the online explosion. The Marie Claire Twitter account not only regularly updates and interacts with their following (it currently has an impressive 79,283 followers!); it has even been known to look for writers from their Twitter community.

In the midst of this exciting new landscape are the fashion bloggers – providing real insight and up-to-the minute commentary. Whether they’re posting images live from the catwalks, revealing latest trends from the streets of Tokyo, they too have become a huge force within the industry and a voice for a new generation of fashionistas.

Blogs such as Catwalkqueen and Stylebubble boast more readers per day than Vogue’s website and the Sartorialist has been named by Time magazine as one of the most influential forces in design. What’s more, bloggers such as Susanna Lau, creator of Style Bubble, are frequently snapping up front row (and extremely limited!) seats at the catwalks of high profile shows such as London Fashion Week.

One thing is for sure – this is an exciting time for the fashion industry and an incredible opportunity for brands to interact with consumers!

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Recent message exchanges with a major mobile phone company have made me think about the role Twitter plays in establishing, building and maintaining customer relationships. Such a short message by nature needs to be succinct and to the point, not something that the majority of big companies have managed in their comms for many years.

This particular mobile phone company picked up on my disgruntled whinge about poor 3G signal, not in the highlands of Scotland but in a part of the country where any mobile phone user would surely expect to have the strongest fastest connection available – especially given the networks 3G maps that Ofcom has on its site. I was quite impressed with the request for more information and the suggestion that this company – not my provider – would be able to do a better job for me. So I responded.

There have been a few more exchanges since and the negotiations – through just 140 characters or less – has lead to this “other” provider now top of my list for when I can afford to change contracts. Not willing to wholly buy me out of my existing contract at this time was at first a disappointment but then business sense took over and the offer to go halves with me seemed pretty reasonable.

What has been missing though is any form of communication from my current provider. Not even recognition that there could be a problem, let alone recognition that a major competitor is taking over my “first name terms” relationship. In my mind this is a major miss, in Twitter speak #fail.

I am not suggesting that the two companies go into a bidding war over a solitary, slightly disgruntled customer, but where one is taking advantage of this new way to personally interact with a potential client the other is majorly missing a trick. Surely customer relationship management 140 characters at a time makes sense, but knowing when to enter into a conversation and when not to is the key. Here one has just about got it right and the other has missed a trick.

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As I far as I was concerned, SXSW (South by Southwest, for those of you not familiar with the acronym) was a music event, a chance for A&Rs, managers and sundry other music industry types to blow their expenses budget, get together for a good gossip and, if there was time, discover some new bands. The advantages for talent spotters are obvious – see as many bands as you can in four days, in a small-ish space so you can get around easy. It’s like In The City (Manchester) or CMJ (New York) but with better weather and more barbecues.

The landscape of the festival has shifted gradually over the last couple of years though, and not just because I personally have shifted from a musical space to a digital one. Last year’s conference saw a massive increase in attendees visiting the interactive sessions at the festival, and the ubiquitousness of the iPhone put a serious strain on mobile networks. This year this process has accelerated even further – services like Foursquare and Gowalla have allowed people to see at a glance exactly where the hottest parties and most happening events are taking place. You can imagine the conversations can’t you? “Wow, [cool venue] has sixty people we sort of know there. It MUST be good”. In fact, the two geolocation services even threw parties on the same night, fuelling the social media focus even further.

We shouldn’t be surprised really, as passion points like music have always been the drivers for the adoption of new technologies and services, but it’s still a little bizarre that the platforms themselves have become the focus of the attention, so much so that the Foursquare/Gowalla parties were THE hottest events. One of the other big talking points from the festival was the Spotify keynote speech where they announced, well not a lot to be honest. But still, it would be nice to have some, like content, coming out of this festival. Seemingly gone are the days of a band like The White Stripes coming out of nowhere to blow everyone away. A quick browse of NME.com and the highlights appear to be Muse and Hole. Not exactly the cutting edge in terms of new music. However, with so many bands springing to people’s attention online via blogs and social networks, and bands themselves generally eschewing traditional models to go it alone, it’s probably a natural evolution. The geeks inheriting the earth. With the ‘talent spotters’ chasing after them, desperate to not be left behind.

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Twitter‘s habit of falling foul to phishing attacks may have come to an end this week as the company announced that it’s stepping up its efforts to eliminate malicious attacks with some new features, described as being able to “detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links before they reach an intended victim.”

According to net security firm Sophos, social networking spam and malware attacks rose 70 per cent last year, with Facebook and Twitter in particular becoming prime targets for Web 2.0 spammers.

More recently, bogus direct messages have invited users to log into counterfeit Twitter sites, and hand over login credentials in the process. Hacked accounts have subsequently sent spam messages, much to the embarrassment of the victims of the attack, including cabinet minister Ed Miliband, online bank First Direct and BBC correspondent Nick Higham.

In news that will be welcomed by the thousands of Twitter users who have fallen prey to such an attack, the popular micro blogging site has decided to fight back.

How does it work? Quite simply, even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, Twitter will be able to keep that user safe. The system is similar to current Gmail security, which automatically checks link destinations, and works by all submitted links being routed to this new service.

Aside from the obvious benefits these new measures bring for the celebrity user and average Twitter fan, businesses will undoubtedly benefit from this extra level of protection. A vast majority of companies are signed-up to the service because on the plus side, Twitter is an effective tool in which to market their brand, giving them the ability to continually and repeatedly promote their products and services to a large audience. On the negative side, if a business falls prey to an embarrassing, or in some cases, damaging phishing attack, a company has left itself open and vulnerable for the masses to see. But is this really the last we will see of Twitter spam attacks?

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You may have heard about the new US start-up that’s been making the headlines recently. Of course, it’s yet another social network. But this is a social network with a very different twist.

Backed by a Twitter co-founder, the site is called Blippy. Much of the design, functionality and user experience mirrors Twitter. It requires you to share your debit/credit card numbers with it, as well as your bank account details and other online accounts such as eBay or iTunes. Every purchase made on these accounts is displayed, in real time, to other Blippy users online.

What did you buy today?

To many, this may seem like the most outrageous sacrifice of privacy and security. Yet the Blippy founders think it holds the key to learn more about deals, new products and consumer spending habits. Surprisingly, quite a few have signed up. 5,000 volunteered to try it during private testing, sharing information equating to $5million worth of purchases. Since launching publicly in January, Blippy has persuaded more than 13,000 consumers to sign up and has even piqued the interest of a number of US investors.

Another key element is the data that Blippy offers, which details where you shopped and the money spent per purchase. It even prints a description on occasion and in the same window your friends are invited to comment on each transaction. So if I saw a DVD a friend of mine purchased, I could ask them if they liked it.

Living this publicly online could be a step too far for many. Especially given the concerns raised recently over location-based and social network sites making it easier for criminals to ascertain when you’re not at home. Despite this, I’ll draw on what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg said recently, which is that ‘living publicly is now the social norm.’ Blippy, therefore, could be the one to watch this year.

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The British Library has recently launched the UK Web Archive, offering access to a huge range of web content that otherwise might have disappeared into a ‘digital black hole.’ Despite being plagued by legal issues currently hindering them from recording much more than 1% of the 8 million websites in existence, the project is an exciting move that has the potential to provide hugely valuable insight into digital trends and behaviour that might otherwise have been lost.

The archive’s ‘special collections’ collate websites on a particular theme, housing everything from the credit crunch to the forthcoming 2010 election. For brands looking to create relevant campaigns that communicate the right messages at the right time, this could be an excellent future resource to help shape online activity that is based on proven behaviour patterns in certain categories and situations.

Aside from its benefits for those of us in the marketing & PR industry, what’s also fascinating about the web archive is that it highlights how integral everything digital has now become to our culture. In the classrooms of the future, children won’t need a textbook to explain the effects of the credit crunch. Instead they’ll be able to read about it firsthand through blogs, Facebook posts and mobile video footage.

For Generation Z, history lessons are set to become much more exciting.

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These two disciplines may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but bear with me, the analogy works out in the end.

I was recently reading a book called Pixarpedia, a behind-the-scenes look at Disney Pixar’s film studio. Almost as soon as I’d opened the first page, the foreword from their CEO, Andrew Stanton, struck a chord:

“When it comes to making our own movies we’re obsessed with figuring out the details that will make our stories real. The first step of that process is ‘city planning’ – figuring out how the world works and what the rules are. From there we work out the particulars of personality and setting.”

‘City planning’, as Stanton puts it, should be fundamental to any PR campaign- and never more so than with social media. Brands that ignore the rules and skip straight to the execution will inevitably end up getting burnt. I won’t go into the well documented social media failures of the past few months, but it is clear that they didn’t take enough time to understand the online landscape before jumping in feet first.

But brands shouldn’t be afraid of social media rules. It’s not a secret doctrine you can’t read about online; just one that requires attention, adaptation and intelligence. Taking time to city plan may seem like a daunting task, but once you’ve figured out the rules, campaigns can go to infinity and beyond…

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