Posts tagged as:

public relations

Only You Can Prevent Social Media Fires

by · February 14, 2013

It’s not every week that we have the opportunity to watch two separate social media disasters unfold in real-time. After last week’s Applebee’s social media catastrophe that followed the firing of Chelsea Welch (who was let go after posting a photo of a stiffed tip on Reddit), many of us thought that it’d be a bit of time before we would see another brand get dragged into the social media spotlight for letting go of an employee. Boy, were we wrong.

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Everything isn’t a nail.

by · January 11, 2013

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” – Abraham Maslow

In the last year, I’ve moved from a multidisciplinary web agency to a small consultancy to a huge eCommerce retailer. In each of these business environments, I’ve noticed how discipline bias can show up in different ways to reduce the effectiveness of any business’ marketing efforts.

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Should PR Representatives Be Allowed To Edit Wikipedia?

by · July 5, 2012

The Chartered Instituted of Public Relations (CIPR) released its first edition of guidance for use of Wikipedia last week. See the full guide in PDF form here. The standards are a collaborative and still on-going effort that includes input from both public relations professionals and wikipedia editors (whom someone has decided to cutely call “Wikipedians”) and has been endorsed by similar organizations in Canada, Australia and the Public Relations Consultants Association, a British organization similar to the CIPR.

You can see and even participate in future collaboration on this project on their project Wiki.

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When Good Email Goes Bad

by · March 29, 2012

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by Megan Feltes, a member of the content team for the email marketing and communications company Emma.

How to deal with mistakes, failures and assorted slip-ups

Email may ultimately be sent and tracked by machines and robots, but it’s still a human endeavor at heart. And as such, email is vulnerable to human error. B2B campaigns are no exception, and errors in emails to customers can feel especially magnified. No matter how many times you read (and re-read) your email copy, a mistake may sneak through. It could be a simple misspelling or a glaringly incorrect link. Did 6,000 recipients see the wrong event date on your email invite? Yikes. Or you could do everything perfectly, but still experience unexpected fallout. Did your website crash after a free shipping offer caused a mad rush? Double yikes. While possibly embarrassing and humbling, mistakes are not the end of the world. Email’s strength lies in its innate timeliness and flexibility.

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Bloggers Are Promotional Partners, Which Is Bad For PR

by · August 4, 2011

I’ve been ranting for some time about the disconnect between PR and social media, and particularly between PR and blogger outreach. In the evolution of social media, somehow blogger outreach became equated with public relations’ pitching to journalists, and so for years it’s been largely the domain of PR coordinators and account executives.

That’s seems wrong. I feel that PR should not be primarily responsible for blogger outreach. And likely not for other types of social media either.

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What Motivates Bloggers?

by · June 23, 2011

If you’re a public relations or communications person who works with bloggers, you’ve probably figured out by now that every blogger is unique. Pitching bloggers is not the same as pitching traditional journalists, because every blogger is motivated differently, whereas journalists are generally motivated to write because they’re being paid to do so and with a (usually) clear editorial direction.

Bloggers, on the other hand, work mainly for themselves. (For the purposes of this post, we’re talking about non-corporate bloggers – those that create and maintain blogs for their own personal use, or as a small business in and of itself.) So determining the motivation of an individual blogger is the key to pitching them successfully, because if you can address their needs, you can often get them to write about your product or service.

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Brands, Aggregators and Journalists: a Conversation with Intel’s Bob Duffy

by · June 6, 2011

Funny how things work out.

You’d think “journalism” was dead as a door nail. Newspapers, magazines and TV news are in decline, and the golden age of reporting dating back to Watergate is long over. Yet there’s a demand in Silicon Valley, and beyond, for people who can dig up stories, create interesting angles, and write compelling blogs.

That sounds like a journalist to me.

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The Blogger’s Guide To PR’s Email Pitches

by · April 27, 2011

Public relations professionals responded en masse to last week’s post offering some guidelines for email pitching. My assertions that PR outreach via email is, indeed, a commercial communications and, thus, falls under the regulatory purview of the Federal Trade Commission and the CAN-SPAM Act was polarizing.

Many did not agree with my opinion that the CAN-SPAM Act also encompasses public relations communications, particularly when a PR person is reaching out to a media outlet or blogger to just establish that all-important relationship. Honestly, I do think there are a lot of gray areas here, but when it comes to following the letter of the law, can we really afford to play in an unclear pool?

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The PR Guide To Email Pitching

by · April 18, 2011

I’ve always considered myself a public relations professional by trade. Even when the general perception of PR isn’t all that good, I still try to advocate for stronger ethics, better measures and more honorable tactics than those that give the industry an iffy reputation. But despite the last several years of trying to help many of my colleagues better understand that blasting and lists and impersonal communications is not only generally not effective but under certain conditions illegal, too many still don’t get it.

So let’s review … and this time pay attention:

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