Are PR Embargoes Dead?
The embargo is one of my favorite PR tactics, but it looks like it will soon be another casualty of the Internet, if it isn’t already. In the ooollllddd days, you could hand out embargoed news and assuming you had a good relationship with the media, the news would sit in the can until the [...]
Know-Nothing Journalists Give Bad PR Advice (Again)
I almost didn’t even react to this latest example of journalists giving businesspeople bad advice about PR, but I couldn’t help it. I figured it was better to blog about it than to leave a comment on someone else’s blog. Here’s the story: a Boston web trade group held an event on Tuesday called, “An [...]
Hooray for frickin’ Carol Bartz of Yahoo!
I’ve decided I’m a big Carol Bartz fan. Note to my contacts at Yahoo: I want to meet her and be her media trainer! The latest Bartz bomb came yesterday in response, again, to one of those “how can Yahoo survive” questions. The Yahoo CEO turned the question around and challenged the media to focus [...]
PR Rule #1: It’s About the Message, Not About the Methods
Generally speaking, it’s a bad sign when your PR strategy becomes the story, rather than the messages you are trying to send. And so it was today, when the New York Times ran five nearly identical pictures on its front page of Obama giving health care reform interviews on five Sunday talk shows, accompanying a [...]
3 No-No’s When You Pitch the Media By Email
Almost all journalists say they want to be pitched by email. So guess what — they are deluged with email pitches! And to make matters worse, most of them are bloated, non-news pitches that get deleted faster than you can say, “did you get my email?” How to avoid the trash bin? That’s easy — [...]
More Media Whining About Standard PR Tactics
When will they ever learn? Never, apparently. Today’s story is the breathless coverage in Stars and Stripes and elsewhere that “dossiers” were created by the PR firm Rendon Group on reporters who wanted to embed with U.S. military in Afghanistan. Oh horrors! According to the story, PR professionals are reading the stories published by journalists [...]
Pitching Business Media Is Getting Tougher and Tougher
One of the untold stories of PR over the last quarter century has been the great rise in business journalism, from a media backwater to a front-and-center element of the media. It just so happens that I had a front-row seat for this transformation, as I entered business journalism in 1981 as part of the [...]
Even White House Reporters Don't Like Interviews "On Background"
One of the most important techniques every spokesperson should master is negotiating the “terms of the interview.” All too often, spokespeople go into interviews assuming one thing, while the journalist assumes another. Later, after the spokesperson has blabbed about your their product, bad-mouthed the competition and otherwise made a fool of himself, he blurts out, [...]
Yahoo's CEO Shows the Big Boys How It's Done
Nice to see some refreshing candor from Yahoo’s newish CEO, Carol Bartz. At the hipper-than-thou D Conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, Bartz stage-whispered the f-bomb at media high priestess Kara Swisher, not a direct shot but definitely a signal that she was to be taken seriously. Then, at the same conference, she interrupted [...]