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 [...]

Interesting Peek At What Real "New Media" Might Look Like

You can call things like Facebook and Twitter “social media” all you want, and they are certainly an interesting new societal development, but they aren’t professional media. There will always be professional intermediaries, storytellers if you will, who will seek to get paid to tell you what’s going on in our world. Will the media [...]

Blogger Research is an Unavoidable Chore

I’m in the midst of creating a fairly important list of bloggers for a client. When completed, this list has the potential to generate key publicity for this client. Yet unlike creating a list of mainstream media targets, I’m finding this process more and more tedious. The reason is implicit in the nature of blogging [...]

Arrington Gets Spat On, Gets Death Threats

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that media relations has gone to a whole new level of bad: he was spat upon this week and was the subject of a death threat last summer. Serious stuff, and seriously out-of-bounds, it goes without saying. Arrington writes a blog, for godsakes. Yes, it is influential, but no company’s life [...]

Is PR Being Infested With Ex-Journalists?

Every day, it seems, there are fresh reports of journalists hungrily moving over into PR for the paycheck. Still, the attitude about PR from the media never changes. Even as their friends go into PR, know-nothing journalists continue to lambast the profession. I know why, of course: because we have almost no professional standards of [...]

The Great Thing About Twitter: You Can Lurk Before You Leap

One thing to understand about Twitter: you can follow someone without their permission, unless they have set their profile so that they have to approve you [which is rarely the case]. This means that you can get someone’s Twitter handle, find them on Twitter and click “follow” and if it doesn’t give you the privacy [...]

Twit-pitching is the future of PR

What’s “Twit-pitching?” It’s using Twitter or other social networks to reach out to the media to pitch stories. But you can’t really pitch them the old-fashioned way — that’s the beauty of it. In a nutshell, Twit-pitching involves two things: relationships and concision. In other words, you have to have some sort of relationship with [...]

Twitter Becoming Greater Force in PR and Media Relations

Twitter, the microblogging site, is becoming a force to be reckoned with in the online and PR worlds. Last week, PR 2.0 guru Brian Solis announced the creation of @micropr, a Twitter identity media and others can use to ask for assistance with stories and other information. Previously, Solis posted a wide-ranging guide to using [...]

“Motrin Moms” Harness the Power of Social Media

God bless social media. Last week, there was no such thing as a “Motrin Mom.” This week, it’s an interest group. The story: McNeil Consumer Health Care, makers of Motrin (otherwise known generically as ibuprofen), posted a 50-second seemingly tone-deaf “ad” on their site offering Motrin as a remedy for mothers of young children whose [...]

Obama’s Communications Moving at Warp Speed

The President-elect has a post-Election transition web site: www.change.gov. Think about that URL for a minute. It’s easy to take this for granted, but we shouldn’t. This is the beginning of the first true new millennium Presidency. Clinton promised a ‘bridge to the 21st century’ but really didn’t take us there. Who knows if Obama [...]

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