Last night, I (along with some colleagues) had the privilege of speaking about social media with a group of PR students at the University of Tennessee. In one part of our talk, we shared a list of helpful tools we use to manage social media, monitor brands, spread information, discover opportunities and track results.

(A guest post by Matt Cheuvront) :: “Personal Branding” has become an idea I wish I could delete from my memory. I get it, really I do – I understand that, especially in this day and age of technological innovation and public communication, we need to consider the things we do and say, and realize that our information is not private online. But we have gotten so caught up in this concept of Personal Branding that it’s starting to take control of our…

I read an article on Gawker today that said New York Times reporter Raymond Hernandez, who covers members of Congress from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, is dating Shrita Sterlin, the communications director for Rep. Edolphus Towns, a Democrat representing parts of Brooklyn…and I got to thinking: Is it ethical for a reporter to date a PR pro if the reporter covers the same topic(s) the flack is pitching?

Last week the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit that governs Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows any web user the opportunity to contribute, edit and improve content, announced Wikipedia’s English version will now limit changes to [...]

As PR pros, we know that perception is EVERYTHING! If the public thinks your company is bad, guess what? It is. You can spend millions and millions of dollars on marketing, but if your customer service sucks…you’re just wasting your money! And when your customers aren’t happy [...]

Football players are idolized by children and adults alike. Little kids grow up looking at people like Vick and thinking “that’s what I want to be when I grow up”. Do you want your child to look up to a murderer?! Michael Vick being reinstated is a crock of shit. Yeah, I get it: he served his time. (And by served his time I mean hung out in his super nice lakefront house which would [...]

Earlier this week, Forbes wrote an article calling out Ted Murphy of Izea Entertainment for paying bloggers to write good reviews of his clients’ products and services. The first line of the article even refers to Ted as a “scam artist”. So what are these “scams” that Ted pulls? He engages bloggers to write reviews for clients like Kmart, Hewlett-Packard, SeaWorld, Sears and Dirt Devil, and he pays them up to [...]

In today’s Web 2.0 world, everyone has a voice and word-of-mouth is more powerful than ever. Of course, you can’t please everyone all the time, but it’s important for companies to recognize that they at least need to care about their customers, otherwise something like this will happen…About a year ago when musician Dave Carroll flew United Airlines [...]

Last week, I blogged about the three reasons why companies shouldn’t cut out their PR budgets, regardless of a poor economy. After writing the post, I got to thinking about PR as a field…and how maybe, sometimes we PR pros just need to be a little better at what we do to prove that we’re worth a part of that budget.
In a world where traditional PR (media relations) is dead, we PR pros are learning that we either need to step up – or fall down. Now I can’t say …

After doing a review a few weeks ago on HARO, I came across this very insightful blog post from Ragan’s PR Daily. And here is the article copy, in its entirety (with permission from Ragan’s of course): A list of dos and don’ts for PR pros contacting journalists on Peter Shankman’s free service [...]