In those far off days when newspapers were populated by hard drinking hacks and  old Imperial typewriters cluttered the desks of smoke ridden newsrooms the impending arrival of  personal  computers was then but a dream for some and  a nightmare for others.

 My memory of the Daily Telegraph news room in those days of yore was a couple of fax machines clattering relentlessly away, churning out reams of paper from what resembled gigantic toilet rolls.  It was, however, those unremitting faxes which carried major news messages from agencies and correspondents  across the globe, many of  which became the banner headlined stories of the following day.

Gone, however, are the beer and gin sodden hacks, much derided as lunchtime o’boozers, along with their typewriters while the fax is fast becoming a relic of yesteryear.  The e-mail is now the much accepted fact of day-to-day communication in both working and personal life; we may sometimes hate the mass of messages on our screen when returning from holiday but there is a way round that – we take a BlackBerry with us so we can check our emails while lying on some sun drenched beach. 

 Yes, with our BlackBerry we can access our favourite social networking site, usually Facebook, perhaps Twitter, and bring our friends and family up to date with just what we’re doing on holiday and, of course, via our mobile we can send them a pic to show just how good we look in our designer swimwear.   Realistically, to be without our mobile is akin to having lost an all important body part. Let’s be honest about all this, if we’re not signed up to one or other social or business networking site, usually both, then we might be perceived as both socially and professionally inadequate!

 To blog or not to blog?  That is the all important question.   The internet plays an increasingly crucial role in our daily lives and the blog, which started off as something of an ego trip for those who wanted to reveal the minutiae of their often boring lives to anyone who was sad enough to read them, is becoming a professional tool.   Blogs are now seen by the media as offering up disclosures by those in public life, revelations which  often give rise to sensational disclosures on the evening news programmes.  Major national, occasionally international, news stories are ‘broken’ via a blog.  And those who bring us the news, the name of the BBC’s Business Editor Robert Peston comes to mind, are enthusiastic bloggers whose musings are closely followed by those addicted to news and the story behind the news. 

So back to the question!  Embrace it and blog away.

Well, its often been said that PR people like the sound of their own voice and the look of their own copy.

I disagree, and we have, for many years been very happy being the anonymous people behind the copy, but the digital revolution has brought us out into the open, publishing our own words for once, on our own Appeal PR Blog.

Why Blog?  Well, like any Bloggers, we have passion.  Our passion is for (most of) our clients, our work, our friends, good inexpensive wine, our region and our industry.

We want to connect with our people we know (and want to know), share our views on things we come across in the course of our working and other lives. Some will be relevant to social media and PR, some will be just random views and observations. 

We are going to write about what we find interesting, useful or we care about.  Hopefully we will have fun writing these posts, and we will take some of the mystery out of the initially daunting world of social media and blogs - that’s what Appeal aims to do within the world of social media PR.  

There is certainly more opinion and obscure knowledge in our office than any other I have ever worked in, whether this ‘window’ the Appeal PR team is enlightening in any way remains to be seen…

Anyway, thanks for reading our first posts, lets see what happens now…