Source This post highlights the nuances associated with crisis communications and not the merit of either case. In the era of socialized media, brands and businesses are now vulnerable to a new era of influencers – their customers. But what happens when the community that championed consumer experiences is accused of exploiting them to extort advertising dollars from the businesses affected by the reviews? User generated reviews aren’t necessarily a brand new concept, epinions, Amazon, among any others have provided…
The Top Social Brands of 2008: What’s Your Conversation Index?
Source Vitrue released a report on the Top Social Brands of 2008 based on an index the company launched last year. The top social brands list is a result of Vitrue’s daily analysis of over 2,000 popular brands. Each day, the team analyzes online conversations on a variety of social networking, blogging, microblogging, photo and video sharing sites. Virtue then applies a series of algorithms to measure the frequency of keyword usage, the size of the social media environment, and…
BusinessWeek Seeks Guidance on Who To Profile in Social Media
Stephen Baker and Helen Walters of BusinessWeek recently asked readers to nominate those individuals who are driving the evolution and pervasiveness of Social Media as part of its “voice of innovation” series. Who is truly the most innovative force within social media? Who’s really making a difference? Who really gets it? Who do you think your fellow BusinessWeek readers NEED to know about? The submissions are in and I’m honored and humbled to be included in the list of candidates. Now,…
TechCrunch Kills The Embargo, But PR Holds the Smoking Gun
Disclosure, I am a contributor to TechCrunch and I have had my fair share of embargoes broken by various reporters and bloggers over the years. In some cases, we trusted the wrong people. Credit In what is sure to come as an absolute surprise to the tech PR industry, TechCrunch proclaimed that it will no longer honor embargoes, unless they’re granted exclusivity. The move was triggered by a growing pattern of underhanded and also irresponsible behavior in the backchannels of…
PR is Not Dead
Source Stop the presses…there’s another “PR is Dead” meme that’s circulating the blogosphere again. This time, all that’s new is that many bloggers are revealing that they prefer discovering new and interesting products on their own and breaking the news before anyone else. Welcome to the news business. Any print or broadcast news reporter would say the same thing, and honestly, it’s the competition and desire to break news first that’s driven the business for over 100 years. Did that…
PR Tips for Startups – The Director’s Cut
Note: This post was originally published on TechCrunch as “PR Secrets for Startups.” Many thanks to Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld for giving me the opportunity to share my experiences with the startup community. Due to space constraints, the original draft, which was entitled “PR Tips for Startups,” did not run in its entirety. Some of the edits actually wound up changing the context of the post and its intentions. I’ve included the full draft for you here, as I…
MicroPR Personalizes Public Relations
New media is forcing the rapid evolution of communications and is reinventing the science of public relations into the art of “personalized” relations. And, with micromedia further refining and improving how we communicate with each other, PR is going to learn the hard way, that the days of blasts and untargeted spam pitching will get us nowhere with today’s influencers. Stowe Boyd placed a stake in the ground during the Web 2.0 Expo with the introduction of #TwitPitch, a very…
The Evolution of Press Releases
Thank you to Erick Schonfeld and Michael Arrington for giving me the opportunity share my vision, and experience, on the evolution of the press release on TechCrunch. There’s certainly no shortage of opinions on where we are and where we need to be in order to improve the working relationships between PR and bloggers, journalists, and analysts and the brands we ultimately represent – including our own. There are just better ways to share information, and hopefully, this post helps…
Making Mistakes and Amends in Blogger and Media Relations
In the rapidly shifting era of blogger and media relations, we can expect one thing to occur as we forge ahead, mistakes. It happens to the best and the worst of us. This isn’t a generic post on how not to make mistakes, or if you do, how to apologize, per se. This is an example of true transparency and public soul searching that will hopefully help and inspire PR practitioners, journalists, and bloggers to learn from the mistakes of…
Social Media Continues to Rival Traditional Media
As each day passes, we’re presented with new information that documents the decline of traditional media in favor of online counterparts and new media competitors. It seems that newspapers are among the hardest hit with circulation and print advertising down – forcing layoffs across the country. The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) recently released a study showing newspaper Web sites attracted an average of about 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter, up about 12 percent over the same…
