Over breakfast downtown, I recently caught up with an old friend who heads the New York office of one of the hot, digitally savvy PR boutiques that’s flourishing in this, the second coming of the startup revolution. We talked about the state of the business and the single biggest challenge she faces right now: how…… Continue reading The PR Pitch
Category: media relations
“Never Hire a PR Firm”
Maverick Mark CubanThat NBA champ, author, and billionaire blogging maverick Mark Cuban offered up some mostly sound advice to the startup community this week in a post titled “Mark Cuban’s 12 Rules for Startups” on Entrepreneur.com.I say mostly because his #11-ranked recommendation read as follows: “Never hire a PR firm. A public relations firm will…… Continue reading “Never Hire a PR Firm”
Questions Answered
Here are the answers to the PR 3.0 Questionnaire:Rank the following in order of their unique visitors per month:#1 (72.8M uniques) NYTimes.com#4 (6M) Gawker.com#5 (5M) Politico.com#3 (7.5M) TechCrunch.com#2 (54M) HuffingtonPost.comMatch the following people with their place of work:Dennis Crowley – FoursquareTina Brown – The Daily BeastAndrew Mason – GrouponPete Cashmore – MashableSheryl Sandberg – FacebookLarry Page…… Continue reading Questions Answered
Oh, That Test!
Over the summer, my wife and I ran into an old friend: PR maven Robbie Vorhaus on the streets of his hometown of Sag Harbor. I’ve known Robbie for far too many years that I’d care to admit. We reminisced about the PR biz back in the day when the choice of media channels and…… Continue reading Oh, That Test!
Cursed Reporters!
Have you ever wanted to tell-off a reporter for getting it blatantly wrong or worse, ignoring your overtures altogether? As PR pros, we forever had to hold our tongues for fear of alienating the very gatekeepers on whom we relied to tell our clients’ stories.I used to say that client relationships come and go, but…… Continue reading Cursed Reporters!
The Aggregated Press Release
“These days PR is everything.” Or so starts a post titled “Press Releases: Friend or Foe” on editorsweblog.org, a “publication of the World Editors Forum.” The post goes on to talk about the value (or lack thereof) of the press release and a couple of new services that attempt to breathe new life into this…… Continue reading The Aggregated Press Release
Long Live PR (and the Press Release Too)
Two posts caught my attention early this week. Both offered fairly dour assessments of the practice of public relations, and as expected, both were heavily re-tweeted into the media echo chamber.The first, from a trade journalist who no doubt has been on the receiving end of myriad PR come-ons and spam, declared that the press…… Continue reading Long Live PR (and the Press Release Too)
How Google PR Rolls
It’s no secret that if you toil in the PR departments of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, eBay, and a handful of the other big-named brands leading the digital revolution, the struggle to gain media share of mind seems effortless compared to the rest of us working with smaller-branded clients.In fact, companies like Google and…… Continue reading How Google PR Rolls
Robo Pitch
From today’s Twittersphere:TechCrunch’s @robinwauters PR pitches I hate: “You have probably already seen the news that blah blah. As you’re drafting your coverage of the news, blah blah blah.”TheNextWeb’s @alex I actually did see the news, and passed. Pitches like that mean I made the right call. Comes across as very arrogant, too.Ad Age’s @Aerocles…… Continue reading Robo Pitch
The Search for the Relevant PR Pitch
I found it ironic that the author of Groundswell, a book/movement/phenomenon that describes how ideas germinate from the ground up — without top-down influence — devoted space in his blog to the PR practice of pitching stories to influencers (e.g., “anyone with an audience”) from the top down. The book posits: “When consumers you’ve never…… Continue reading The Search for the Relevant PR Pitch