UC San Diego PR Nightmare!
It’s that time of year again, as parents and high school seniors anxiously await the ‘fat’ or ‘thin’ envelopes from the colleges of their choice. Only this year and for some time, colleges have also sent out emails announcing the news. That’s what UC San Diego did this week — except they sent the “you’re [...]
Which New Media Skills Do PR People Need to Compete?
This post is a follow-up to a great post by PR Pro Sarah Evans called, “Top 4 new skills all PR professionals must have.” You MUST read this post. Evans’ top four skills are: basic HTML coding, SEO for PR, how to use a Social Media Release, and online presence (on Facebook, Twitter, blogging, et [...]
Journalists Expect to Receive Your Press Release Via Email
The headline of this post may sound stunningly obvious, but let me repeat and explain: the vast majority of journalists prefer to find out about your press release by getting it in their email inbox. According to a survey of more than 2,300 journalists conducted by Bulldog Reporter and TEKgroup International, email was the preferred [...]
If your corporate web site looks credible, media sites will link to it
Time and again, the biggest complaint from journalists trying to do company research on the web is corporate web sites are hard to navigate and hard to use. “If they’re not usable, we’ll just go to Google,” says Dan Gaines, managing editor of LATimes.com. But a good credible corporate site? Gaines says that more and [...]
News Wires Are for Web Dissemination, Not Reaching Newsrooms
I did a release this morning about my interesting new client, Shareholder Representative Services. They are a very successful new company pioneering a new market niche in the venture capital space. The release was about a new client win. Now, the vast, vast majority of new client press releases are turgid and boring and will [...]
Media Still Underwhelmed By Press Areas of Corporate Web Sites
Here’s another area that PR needs to get right yesterday if we are to survive or grow as a business over the long-term: meeting the needs of journalists via our corporate web sites. All too often, our sites are repositories of incomplete or merely promotional information, rather than the facts and figures that journalists need [...]
Obama's Rhetoric Tops My 2009 Comms Wish List
It has been a long, long time since we’ve had a president or other national leader with the rhetorical skills of Barack Obama. It is going to be a treat to listen to him talk and use the power of communications to push his agenda. So Obama tops my 2009 Comms Wish List. Here are [...]
To Stay Relevant, You Better Learn About Digital Marketing
Contrary to conventional wisdom, many of the “traditional” functions on PR are not going away any time soon. These include things like media relations, crisis PR and trade shows. Companies will still need people to do these things. Media relations, in particular, is not going away, despite dire warnings about the death of the mainstream [...]