Top Tech Products of the Decade Were All About Communications

HuffPost has a “top 11″ list of tech products of the decade, and I was stunned at how many of them were communications tools that radically reshaped the way we think, interact, and entertain ourselves.
Among HuffPo’s top 11:

iPod: little needs to be said, except, do you remember your life before having gigabytes of music in [...]

Is This the West Coast’s Top PR Event of the Year?

The PR industry has typically had a serious East Coast slant, mostly for good reason, and that means the biggest PR events usually happen in New York or Washington. Many of the biggest companies in the world are located in the Northeast Corridor, as is the stock exchange, the capital, and the media industry. Here [...]

The “keyword trifecta” and other great web writing tips

Tips from today’s PR University web writing audio conference:

Your press releases should contain a “keyword trifecta”: Your keyword search term should be in your headline and your first paragraph, and the keyword in your first paragraph should link to your web site. HT: Sarah Skerik, PR Newswire
Be generous with your links — people often don’t [...]

Silicon Valley PR Gets the New York Times Treatment

I was out on holiday for most of last week and so missed the opportunity to offer some timely insights into the glorious coverage of Silicon Valley PR in the New York Times on Saturday, July 4 (an aside — why does our industry get coverage only on national holidays and other B-list days?).
Young Times [...]

When is a press release not a press release?

The term “press release” is a whopper of a misnomer. The public communication we call a “press release” hasn’t simply been a message to the media for a long time.
Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in real [...]

Get Ready for the Facebook Vanity URL Mad Rush

The countdown has begun (and you can watch it here): at 12:01 am ET on Saturday morning June 13, Facebook users will be able to create usernames (aka “vanity URLs) for their profiles using real words rather than just the numbers that now represent each user.
In other words: currently I am user #748461753 on Facebook, [...]

Long Live New Media

With all the hand-wringing about the decline of metropolitan newspapers and other print media, you’d think that the traditional media was simply drying up and blowing away and leaving us in a media-free society. But that’s hardly the case.
For one thing, traditional print and electronic media are far from dead and buried. They may be [...]

When You Pitch the Media, It's Not About You

If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about PR, it would be this: to make all press releases and PR pronouncements about the interests of readers, users and editors, not about the organization issuing the press release.
Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news stories [...]

Did You Know that Evite Sucks?

By now, pretty much everyone on the Internet has gotten or sent an Evite, those ubiquitous, slightly annoying online invitations to everything from weddings to barbacues.
I don’t care much for Evite, but I don’t hate it. It’s an online system, it has some cool features that weren’t available pre-Internet, and it does what it’s supposed [...]

Online Media Echo Chamber Tries and Convicts Domino's

I’m skeptical about the supposedly major damage done to the Domino’s brand by a gross YouTube video a couple of its employees made showing them sneezing on a sandwich and doing other inappropriate food-handling things (you can search for the video online if you want).
Soon after the video hit YouTube and started to make the [...]

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