Here are my notes from my first impression of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s second son, Saif al-Islam. At the time, July of 2007, Saif al-Islam was Gaddafi’s favorite and his likely successor. I wrote: “A rather dim-witted, disinterested brat. A bit distracted, but very stylish.” But I added later: “That first impression was dead wrong. The [...]
Read more
Archive | Public Relations RSS feed for this section
A Single Tweet Can Cause A lot of Damage
February 4, 2011
2 Comments
We want companies to freely use social media. We demand honesty, transparency and authenticity from them on those channels. And then punish them accordingly when they do so. The latest example of this great social hypocrisy happened to Kenneth Cole, the chairman and chief creative officer of a shoe company of the same name. Cole’s [...]
Read more Traditional Media Becoming Obsolete, Not the Media Itself
December 20, 2010
0 Comments
Here are the facts: Newspapers circulation numbers are falling like a rock. The New York Times daily circulation in 1990 was 1.1 million and is now less than 900,000. The Los Angeles Times circulation dropped from 1.25 million in 1990 to less than 600,000 The big three TV networks accounted for more than 45% of [...]
Read moreThe Danger of Arrogant Writing
August 12, 2010
2 Comments
Guest Blog Post By: Dave Yewman It happens all the time – and it’s usually an engineer who says it. During a presentation workshop I’ll go on a rant about jargon; how it kills communications; how using it is arrogant, and how much audiences hate the insider terms and silly acronyms that populate so much [...]
Read moreUsing Social Media for Media Relations
July 19, 2010
1 Comment
The conversations on social media usually focus on direct-to-consumer marketing or on one-on-one customer service. One area often neglected is how to use social media to influence the mainstream press. Remember the mainstream press? You know – ABC News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the thousands of newspapers, trade and [...]
Read moreThe PR Consquences of Profanity
May 27, 2010
0 Comments
I wrote about the profanity-laced exchange between tech blogger Mike Arrington and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz earlier this week. My post focused on the proliferation of profanity on the internet and on social networks. My colleague Dave Reddy, senior vice president and media director at Weber Shandwick, has an excellent perspective on the issue from [...]
Read moreThere is no Authenticity Online
May 4, 2010
4 Comments
My daughters were having a dance party (don’t ask!) the other afternoon. My wife was describing the scene to me over dinner when I asked: “Did you get it on video?” She shook her head and replied, “If I had picked up the video camera, it would have changed everything.” What my wife meant was [...]
Read moreTarget Pistols Not Cluster Bombs
April 22, 2010
0 Comments
Repeat after me. “I will not send a generic, mass-produced email pitches to bloggers.” In fact, you shouldn’t send a generic, mass-produced emails to anyone. There’s a name for that type of communications. It’s called Spam. And what do most people do with Spam? They delete it. The cluster bomb approach no longer works. Target [...]
Read moreThis Tweet Brought to You By…
April 19, 2010
0 Comments
PR vs. Advertising The two disciplines have had an uneasy alliance for the last few years because of social media. On the agency side, advertising and PR companies want to own the social space. Both see social media as a natural extensions of what they already do: Advertisers see social media as an additional channel [...]
Read moreDo PR Agencies Need Filters?
March 4, 2010
3 Comments
Or more specifically do PR agencies need to build internal filtering systems for the content they create for clients? This week Weber Shandwick CEO Harris Diamond swung by the Cambridge office of Weber Shandwick. (Disclosure: I work at Weber Shandwick and Harris is my boss – although I do not report directly to him). During [...]
Read more
Creative Commons License
HighTalk by George F. Snell III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at hightalk.net.
HighTalk Readers Engage: