Get Real: PR Isn't Going Anywhere

Raging debate over at and around Silicon Valley Watcher, a blog run by former Financial Times writer Tom Foremski. Tom contends that PR is a dying industry, headed down the same rat hole as the dead-tree media business. A sampling from Tom: I’ve long warned the PR industry that it is on borrowed time. The [...]

Online Ethics Panel Coming Up

The PRSA Silicon Valley panel on online ethics for journalists and PR professionals, rescheduled from September, is coming up: it’s scheduled for October 30, 8-9:30 am at the offices of Cooley Godward Kronish in Palo Alto. If you can make it, I hope you will join us. Here’s the reg form and here’s the description [...]

The News Cycle is Dead

The news cycle is dead. Long live “The Opinion Cycle.” So says Lee Ann Schreiber, ombudsman for ESPN. In a terrific piece on ESPN.com, Schreiber dissects various sports “controversies” and concludes that a) very little actual reporting was done but b) tons of opinions were spewed. She wrote: “If you look at the proportion of [...]

New White Paper on Online PR

Great new white paper from e-consultancy on the state of online PR. Definitely worth downloading. Some nuggets for you: The rise of user-generated content (‘UGC’) and blogging means that there is a growing need to be able to monitor, engage with, and respond to what is being said about you, your brand, product or service [...]

My Coffee With Elke

Had coffee today with Elke Heiss, VP of Sterling Communications and head of their SF office. I know Elke from doing a media training program for one of her clients, ShoreTel Inc., last year. First of all, Elke recommended that I stop calling my training programs “media training” and instead re-position them as “spokesperson training,” [...]

Burson-Marsteller Outed as Microsoft's Sock Puppet

The Wall Street Journal and the U.K.’s Observer both outed Burson-Marsteller today as the “sock puppet” of Microsoft’s effort to create an Internet industry group to oppose Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick. Seems B-M has sent emails to players in the Internet space urging them to join a new industry group, Initiative for Competitive Online [...]

Fundamentals of SEO for PR

Here’s an excellent free resource for PR people everywhere: a 3-part series on optimizing your press releases for the web (SEO = Search Engine Optimization). I recommend you read the 3 parts in their entirety. But here are a few nuggets of wisdom: Identify the crucial descriptive keywords for your release. Use these terms to [...]

Yah-oops!

Yahoo is apparently testing a new service called Yahoo Mash – testing it internally that is. But then someone from Yahoo sent a log-in invitation to New York Times tech writer Brad Stone. As Stone writes on an NY Times blog: I followed the link to mash.yahoo.com, which bounced me to a username/password page, titled Yahoo [...]

It's Ethics Month for PRSA

September is Ethics Month for PRSA. Not sure what that means in terms of actual practice. As noted below, we at the Silicon Valley chapter are holding a panel on online ethics on Oct. 30, rescheduled from last week. Whatever else PRSA is doing, they did publish an interesting roundtable discusion by members of their [...]

Ogilvy's Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics

Nice job by the folks at Ogilvy PR to come up with a code of ethics in conducting blogger media relations. Their code is reprinted below in its entirety. It’s as much a Code of Blogger Media Relations Best Practices as it is a Code of Ethics. It’s an outstanding starting point and something every [...]

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