Why Are Companies Not Valuing Judgment As A Critical Element

Guest post by Noemi Pollack, CEO & Founder of The Pollack PR Marketing Group, a 25-year old integrated PR and marketing agency in Century City, CA. Inevitably, when corporate America seeks a PR agency to support their communications effort, the Request for Proposals (RFP) asks for critical capabilities that can help a company sift through […]

The 8 Wrong Questions PR Firms Are Asking About Social Media

The enthusiasm about social media among public relations professionals is rampant, and encouraging. Wanting to be at the center of a new way to communicate to customers and prospects is a worthy objective. But, under pressure from digital and advertising agencies each looking to be the driver of the social media express, PR firms are […]

What BP Can Learn from Umpire Jim Joyce

jim joyce

We don’t ask for much, really. We may be the least vindictive, grudge-holding society ever. For the most part, we’ve forgiven Tyson, Clinton, Nixon (my father-in-law is still a hater), Tylenol and about 63,157 other transgressions. We’ll forgive Roger Clemens. We’ll be okay eventually with Mel Gibson. Same thing with Marion Jones. And Tiger. But […]

4 Ways Bloggers Differ From Reporters

You have to pitch bloggers differently than reporters. The marvelous Dave Fleet writes a lot about this topic, and Chris Brogan produced a terrific, straightforward post about blogger pitching recently. Here’s my thoughts on some advanced blogger pitching ideas and the key differences between bloggers and reporters. Influence is Made Not Born Guess how many […]

HARO Gets Serious About Crowd Sourced Journalism

Help A Reporter Out (HARO), the uber-simple brainchild of hyper-active, skydiving, PR wild child Peter Shankman has gone big-time. Born humbly as a simple way for reporters to connect with potential sources, HARO has grown to more than 50,000 participating reporters, with 150,000 people receiving three daily emails stuffed with requests for sources. Not surprisingly, […]

Social Media Plus Sucking Equals Success

Sometimes being wrong feels so right. Truth and candor are in short supply these days. Perhaps it’s always been this way, but it sure seems like there’s an awful lot of politicians, celebrities, and athletes that have been unmasked as liars and losers. Soon we’ll have someone taking steroids while cavorting with hookers and debating […]

Dave Fleet – The Twitter 20 Interview About PR and Social Media

If you’re in public relations or social media (preferably both), and you aren’t following the thinking of Dave Fleet, you’re resource-deficient. A Brit living in Toronto and working as an Account Director at social PR powerhouse agency Thornley Fallis, Dave takes a lucid, common-sense approach to the upheaval that social media has brought to the […]

Panic in the Aisles – Airborne Social Media Lessons

I was on a flight home from Kansas City last week when a bit of condensation apparently emitted from the air conditioning as we were preparing for take-off. A passenger shouted “there’s smoke in the plane” followed by a second passenger, then a third, etc. The flight attendants were a bit stunned and immediately got […]

4 Brand-Saving Recommendations for Social Media Crisis Management

social media crisis management

Is today your Domino’s? Social media can both create and solve crises, and the incredibly fluid nature of social conversations requires brands to be on a constant state of readiness. In April, two Domino’s employees created a foolish and disgusting video, and posted it to YouTube, setting off a firestorm of coverage on Twitter. It […]

Back Up the Bus – The Changing PR Timeline

Before I got involved in online marketing in 1994, I helped manage political campaigns. In those days, the formula was pretty consistent. You targeted different voter groups with direct mail, radio and TV. Then, with about two weeks left in the campaign, you brought out the big guns and dropped a big TV and direct […]

Why Can’t PR Do Digital?

twenty dollar bills

Why aren’t PR firms offering digital marketing services to their clients? On Sunday, David Anderson from Off Madison Ave and I presented this roundtable at the PRSA Counselor’s Academy conference in Palm Desert. The title is: Revenue.com: Launching Digital Marketing Services to Grow Retainers. Note we only had ~30 minutes, so this isn’t as comprehensive […]

A New Formula for Measuring PR Success

Isn’t there a better way to measure PR effectiveness? Experienced digital marketers know that “conversion rate” is the holy grail of online success metrics. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a Web site that accomplish an objective. If 100 people visit your Web site, and 7 of them fill out your lead form, […]

6 Ways to Revolutionize PR and Press Releases

Audiences are continuing to fragment. The explosion in TV channels, radio stations and magazines, combined with Tivo, the Web, and iTunes has made it possible for everyone to live the long tail dream. To create for themselves a hyper-targeted reality where they watch, listen and read precisely the things that reflect their personalized tastes and […]

Shannon Paul – The Twitter 20 Interview on Social Media and PR

Shannon Paul burst onto the social media scene like a runaway freight train. Her blog is a must-read, and she’s transformed the social media stylings of the Detroit Red Wings, and most recently the innovative financial services company Peak6. Shannon’s insights on attaining internal alignment around social media, and the new role of public relations […]

Lee Odden – The Twitter 20 Interview on SEO and Social Media

Lee Odden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing a first-class search, social, email and online PR consultancy based in sunny Minneapolis. A conference legend, Lee speaks somewhere in America about digital marketing on a seemingly daily basis. He is widely recognized as a leader in the convergence of historically separate tactics like search, PR, and […]

Who Wins the Struggle for Social Media Control

(post originally written for MarketingProfs Daily Fix) How do we know social media is for real? Because the various marketing disciplines are locked in a critically important tug-of-war that will decide who owns it. This fight will be a central component of boardroom discussions, conference keynotes, and merger activity in 2009. While it’s true that […]