2013 has been a fruitful year for Firefly and our clients. To celebrate – and in true Christmas cheer – we’ve decided to edit a Christmas classic to incorporate some of our 2013 highlights.

So without further ado, Firefly presents… “The 12 days of PR Christmas”.

12^th day of Christmas – 12 bloggers blogging: A blog gives your company and employees an open platform to express themselves, showing thought leadership, adding value to the online conversation, prompting engagement and much more. Practicing what we preach, at Firefly, we’re passionate bloggers.  As a team we’ve created a vast library of content on topics such as LinkedIn Hall of Shame, Game of Thrones (as a PR lesson of course!) and 25 vlogs on the past present and future of PR featuring, amongst others, leading journalist Charles Arthur - all available on the Firefly blog.

11^th day of Christmas – 11 tweets-a-trending: We run the Twitter feed for Savvis, a global provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions. Since taking over the feed we have increased the total number of followers by 390%, and more than doubled the Klout score. During Cloud Expo Europe, a key industry trade show, we conducted a social media campaign leveraging Savvis’ partnerships, enabling us to reach 69,913 accounts and make 204,193 impressions.

10^th day of Christmas – 10 journos jotting: Electronics journalists are always keen to hear the latest news from our client Freescale, an embedded processing solutions provider. Over the year, the team has helped Freescale to build strong media relationships, with 31 interviews taking place in 12 months. These covered trade shows, new product announcements and briefings with senior figures in the business.

9^th day of Christmas – nine radio ramblings: Firefly organised a half day of live and pre-recorded radio interviews for “social petwork” (a social network for pets, of course!) Yummypets’. The radio campaign was fronted by celebrity ambassadors Amy Childs (formerly of The Only Way in Essex) and Gabriella Ellis (of Made in Chelsea notoriety). This resulted in 66 radio interviews, reaching a total of 16,836,150 listeners – a key pillar of the PR programme that secured Yummypets over 20,000 active new British users in just three months.

8^th day of Christmas – eight coverage clippings: In the last quarter of 2013, the team reached out to the regional press on behalf of older people’s charity Independent Age. Our PR activity gained over 100 pieces of regional coverage, to support the charity’s release of their free Wise Guide, aimed to help older people from missing out on vital benefits. Around 1000 Wise Guides have been sent out each day since the Firefly campaign began, which is more than a 5-fold increase on distribution pre-PR.

7^th day of Christmas – seven samples sending:  This year, we’ve sent in excess of 150 press samples for memory specialists Crucial, resulting in widespread media coverage in the tech trade, including Wired, PC Advisor, Expert Reviews, Bit-Tech, Tech Radar, The Register, Hardware Heaven, Stuff Magazine, Computer Active, Computer Shopper, Custom PC and many more.

6^th day of Christmas – six page ranks peaking: Boosting search rankings is part and parcel of PR these days. A great recipe for success is to hook a piece of content on a topical matter and have it appear on a traffic driving site – and this is exactly what Firefly did for Bounty Network (then Job Bounties), the peer-to-peer recruitment site. When Pope Benedict XVI resigned, the internet flooded with potential replacements – from the absurd (mostly), to the genuinely suitable. Firefly was quick to spot the opportunity and posted a tongue-and-cheek job description, which was posted on The Drum, then made the rounds on Twitter and Facebook driving considerable and valuable traffic to the Bounty Network site.

5^th day of Christmas – five gold awards: Five award wins for any client may sound optimistic, but this is the level Firefly has secured for Give as you Live, the charitable shopping website. This year, Give as you Live has received the following accolades:

-          Smarta 100 business of the year 2013

-          Smarta 100 award for biggest social impact

-          Best giving platform by the Institute of Fundraising

-          The Internet World Peoples Choice Award

-          Shortlisted for Social Enterprise of the Year at the National Business Awards

4^th day of Christmas – four feature pitches: Features are part and parcel of a well functioning press office. Over the course of 6 months in 2013, we’ve placed Omnico – a global retail technology provider – and their customers in over 20 features, across leading national and retail publications such as The Sunday Times, Retail Week, Drapers and The Grocer (warning: paywalls!)

3^rd day of Christmas – three piggy backs: What do a penguin, a hummingbird and a panda all have in common? They’re all Google algorithm updates of course and ripe for issues hijacking! SEO specialists The Search Agency love working with Google, but even more, they love talking about Google. In 2013, we helped them hijack and become thought leaders on hot topics, including Google +, the Scroogled campaign, multichannel retail, the future of search, boosting your online profile and how to make money of the internet.

2^nd day of Christmas – two viral videos:  It’s safe to say that Vimeo is the home of awesome videos. It’s for that reason that iconic brands choose Vimeo for their marketing campaigns.  Firefly supported Vimeo and Old Spice in an innovative partnership, which saw spokesperson Terry Crews turn into a musical muscle machine for an online interactive campaign. After seeding the story to trend-setting titles like Shortlist and The Drum, the video was fast making the rounds online with many commenting and sharing on their own musical compositions, created by playing his muscular orchestra by using the keyboard at the end of the video.

1^st day of Christmas – a full page in the FT: A full page is a tall order; but we managed a half page in the FT on November 30th for our client InvestingZone, on the subject of the Financial Conduct Authority’s proposed regulation of crowdfunding. In fact, since InvestingZone launched back in May, we’ve secured coverage for them in every national newspaper – apart from the Observer. Still, everyone needs a challenge for the New Year!

Thank you for all your support this year. We wish all our clients, friends and followers a very Merry Christmas and a wonderfully prosperous 2014.