Starbucks’ Free WiFi is a Big Deal – Here’s Why

News flash: I just moved to an office in downtown San Francisco — woohoo! I love The City, and now I have a chance to be here everyday again. I last worked in SF in 1997.
One thing that has changed since 1997 — there are a LOT more Starbucks in downtown SF. No duh. There [...]

“Vitch” is the first new PR catchword of 2010

Why send a plain old written PR pitch when you can send a “vitch” — a video pitch?
That’s right, the new thing is to make your pitch via video. It’s certainly simple enough to do — plan your video, shoot it with an inexpensive video camera, upload it to Youtube and spread the link.
Makes a [...]

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 [...]

Company Gets $500,000 in VC Funding to Bridge the Gap Between PR and Media

I am one who believes there will always be a chasm between the media and PR, unless and until the media dies and all media is PR. Which I hope does not happen.
I’ve been working on the media/PR divide much of my career. I was known as a sympathic media person who helped PR people [...]

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 [...]

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 agreed-upon [...]

The difference between the mainstream media and online media keeps getting smaller

Everyone knows that the mainstream media and the online media are two very different beasts, at least in their roots and points of view. But as we get further into the Internet revolution and the weakening of the business models of the mainstream media, the lines are really starting to blur.
I ran across an example [...]

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 on [...]

Great insights into New York Times blogging

MyRagan.com has a great article  by Paul Boutin, a Times freelancer and VentureBeat.com writer, about the nuts and bolts of blogging for the New York Times. It’s free today but may go behind Ragan’s paid sub firewall soon so check it out while you can.
Inside peek: How The New York Times handles its blogs
Excerpt:

In many [...]

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 [...]

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