Starbucks’ Free WiFi is a Big Deal – Here’s Why
News flash: I just moved to an office in downtown San Francisco — woohoo! I love The City, and now I have a chance to be here everyday again. I last worked in SF in 1997.
One thing that has changed since 1997 — there are a LOT more Starbucks in downtown SF. No duh. There [...]
Ticketmaster Tries to Solve a Big Problem With a Little PR Push
One of the most important lessons of crisis communications is that most crises are not communications problems, they’re operational problems. Communications can help in many ways to diffuse a crisis and calm people down, but if the operational issue at the heart of the problem isn’t addressed, no amount of PR spin is going to [...]
dna13's new Enterprise edition is the next generation of reputation monitoring
We’re now far enough along in the development of the Internet and desktop software that corporations can now access very sophisticated tools to monitor the messages flowing out there in the world about them. I recently had a chance to demo dna13’s new Enterprise software and it looked to me like the future of reputation [...]
Maybe Dan Abrams Is On To Something
Dan Abrams, the MSNBC talker and would-be PR counselor, has been taking some heat (from this blogger and elsewhere) about the stated strategy of his Abrams Research shop to use working journalists as moonlighting PR consultants to his clients.
With journalism under siege and journalism jobs vanishing faster than you can say “Huffington Post,” it does [...]
Chevron Rebuts '60 Minutes' With Its Own Video
Chevron got grilled on “60 Minutes” a couple of weeks ago for its alleged contamination of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador. If you’re huge oil company, that’s definitely par for the course. Causing environment damage? Check. Getting caught? Check. Getting unfavorable treatment on 60 Minutes? Check.
This is the pattern that major multi-nationals have been [...]
Even Hizbollah Has a Media Relations Department
There’s a new book out by the New York Times correspondent Neil MacFarquhar called, amazingly, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday.
Yes — you read that right. The Lebanese militant organization Hizbollah has a PR department, and it sends birthday greetings to New York Times correspondents. What a world.
MacFarquhar’s book is [...]
A Must-Have Measurement Checklist by KD Paine
KD Paine, the Queen of PR Measurement, has just put out a must-have checklist for PR Measurement programs. You can download it here, and following is an executive summary:
Define the objectives of your PR program, and what you hope to accomplish with a measurement report (e.g., increase your budget, get more internal support)
Define the audiences [...]
Was Maddow's Rant Against PR Fair or Foul?
By now you’ve probably heard about the otherwise wonderful Rachel Maddow’s rant about PR and specifically, about industry giant Burson-Marsteller, regarding B-M’s representation of AIG, the big insurance company that has gotten tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout cash.
Maddow let her inner media whiner out and went on a classic anti-PR rant about [...]
Attention PR Clients: You Have Control, So Use It!
If your business is healthy or big enough to have or need an outside PR agency, you are a prized commodity these days. So act like it! You don’t have to take what the agency gives you, you can demand what you need, hold them accountable, and fire them if you have to. It’s your [...]