Jon Greer has been analyzing media and PR for more than 25 years. He's been a journalist and a PR executive, and has been a featured speaker for many years at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit, and served as Bulldog's Editorial Director for their PR University series of weekly...
You've probably heard about the "Long Tail" theory of the web -- that instead of needing to rely on big hits, businesses on the web could expect to see a trickle of steady business as people in need of their products or services used the web to find them. But...
Here's a cheat sheet for your blogger relations program. If you follow these steps you'll have a lot more success and will be well on your way to establishing a credible voice for your company or client in the blogosphere: Start With Research -- Every Blog Has:...
When you're in PR, it's easy to get lost in the day-to-day dramas, crises and opportunities, and to lose sight of big picture. The name for that big picture is "reputation management." Essentially, reputation management is everything you do over the long-term to protect, enhance and burnish...
There's always been a steady stream of media types transitioning into PR, but these days, it seems like a flood. Yet despite the fact that journalists and PR people have close professional links, that doesn't mean it's easy for journalists to make the switch to the other side. It's like...
Do you know the fundamental building blocks of a solid internal PR department? Matt Broder, VP of External Communications at Pitney Bowes, shared his perspective on a PR Management Roundtable webinar this week. The five elements are: Ownership and accountability: ask yourself what parts of the communications...
Sometimes, your internal audiences can be the most important "public" for your public relations efforts. After all, if your own people don't know what's going on, and can't accurately communicate the company's messages and positioning, how can you expect outsiders to get it? But how do you...
It's not everyday that our friends at the New York Times offer press release writing tips, but they did so today in a story headlined, "Need Press? Repeat: 'Green,' 'Sex,' 'Cancer,' 'Secret,' 'Fat'" The Times took as a starting point a press release about the alleged toxicity...
There has always been a steady stream of media people making the career transition into PR. But with the serious financial and business model problems plaguing most major media, journalists who once looked down their noses at what they call "the dark side" are starting to think that things might...
Here's a follow-up on Monday's Catching Flack post about whether it's better or worse for PR that bloggers are now being offered journalism training from the Society of Professional Journalists. The vote so far on the poll: 14 for trained bloggers, 3 for untrained. I was glad...
How do the best PR departments operate? The authors of the USC-Annenberg study of PR departments compiled a list of 13 best practices among the more than 500 PR departments that responded to their survey: Maintain a higher than average ratio of PR budget to gross revenue....
According to the USC-Annenberg study of 520 PR departments in the U.S., PR practitioners are feeling very good these days about their relationship with top management. This survey result is at odds with conventional wisdom, which has PR people perpetually wringing their hands about their perceived lack...
Blogs are the Wild West of new media opportunities for doing PR. Unlike old media, run by journalists with decades of experience and set ways of doing things, blogs are in their infancy, and even the ones run or written by former old media journalists are more or less unburdened...
Leave it to a lawyer-turned-journalist to be the one to take the bait and use the Scott McClellan tell-all as an opportunity to rip the PR industry. I told you this would be one of the consequences of McClellan's sell out. It happened on CBS Sunday Morning...
According to the USC-Annenberg Study of PR departments, PR departments on average saw their budgets increase by 7% in 2007, and they expected their budgets to increase by 5% in 2008. The survey was taken in the second half of last year, when there was much less talk of recession...
In case you were wondering whether the world has gone completely safe and prudish, we bring you this blog post from EW.com: To Publicist: No Need to Call and Ask If I Am Feeling Sexy The client: R&B singer Scott Gertner ...
According to the USC-Annenberg study of PR departments, PR is doing a somewhat better job of evaluating its contribution to the achievement of key corporate goals, but we remain far from successful in developing and using evaluation methods that really get the bosses' attention. "The authors believe that the...
The Strategic Public Relations Center at USC has released its annual study of Generally Accepted Practices in internal PR departments, and it is chock-full of insights that should be valuable both to inside communicators and outside consultants. The study looks at practices across-the-board including budgets, evaluation, reporting...
Scott McClellan is going to be rich man. The former Bush press secretary's about-face regarding what he and the White House said while he was Bush's spokesman will make his book fly off the shelves and will probably double his speaking fee and the demand for his services. ...
What do Dell, Panasonic, Hormel, H&R Block and Zappos.com have in common? They are all actively monitoring what's being said about them on Twitter, the micro-blogging site where people post very short bursts of opinion, information and other marginalia. If these companies have figured out Twitter, it's...
Last week, we talked about how President Bush was breaking new ground in doing the first Presidential on-camera online only interview. This week the news is about the Republican who wants to succeed him, John McCain, and his creative blogger relations strategy. McCain is scheduling briefings with left-wing bloggers like...
Jon Greer has been analyzing media and PR for more than 25 years. He's been a journalist and a PR executive, and has been a featured speaker for many years at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit, and served as Bulldog's Editorial Director for their PR University series of weekly...
