The Startup Hype Cycle

I recently started writing for Ev and Biz’s new site Medium to complement my seven-year-old PR/media/tech-focused blog The Flack and musings on Forbes.com and Bulldog Reporter. But I wanted to do something a little different for Medium. I wanted to explore a topic in which I had first-hand experience that would also resonate with other potential…… Continue reading The Startup Hype Cycle

Match.com for PR?

My friend, former client and occasional collaborateur Christine Mohan flagged the inclusion of my tweet in a TechCrunch piece yesterday on the launch of AirPR, a “match.com”-like service that attempts to fix our “broken” PR industry. It followed TC’s first story touting the imminent arrival of this VC-fueled and managed service.Love it when non-PR people claim…… Continue reading Match.com for PR?

EMail: Love it or Hate it

For more than a decade, email has endured as the preferred mode for engaging journalists in an “earned media” paradigm. Of course, the term earned media wasn’t in the PR lexicon ten years ago. We simply called it media or editorial relations.PCNY Panel (8/7): NY Daily News, Good Day NY, HuffPost, WPLJ, BuzzfeedAs much as…… Continue reading EMail: Love it or Hate it

The A Team’s PR Missteps

TechCrunch’s ArringtonIsn’t it ironic? After years of railing against PR people, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington certainly could have used a good PR person when announcing CrunchFund, his first formal and well-financed foray into funding tech startups.Absent such counsel, Mr. Arrington now finds himself summarily booted from the tech media enterprise he started and nurtured into…… Continue reading The A Team’s PR Missteps

Your Weekend Viewing

NaarlySo it appears that the marketing team at Zaarly, a site that helps you “buy and sell with people around you,” approached the uber-influential tech site founded and run by one of the company’s investors, to produce a quirky promotional video leveraging said founder’s new executive assistant. Here’s the piece on TechCrunch and the video:…… Continue reading Your Weekend Viewing

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

Forget the Bong

Over the weekend, the inimitable Michael Arrington — he of TechCrunch fame — laid down the gauntlet to reputation minders everywhere via a blog post titled: “Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions.” The post, which Mr. Arrington tweeted and retweeted assiduously, asserted that the myriad anonymous opinions, spawned by social media, renders…… Continue reading Forget the Bong

Start-Up.com

Who remembers those 20-something masters of the dot-com (Web 1.0) universe? These were smart, yet insufferably self-important snoots who claimed to have invented some doodad that the world simply couldn’t live without.Rather than focus on the utility and profitability of their products or services, they sought to bask in the adulatory spotlight of media like…… Continue reading Start-Up.com

Facebook Finds Its PR Mojo

Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington has tweaked a few noses as proprietor of perhaps the most influential tech blog in a milieu overrun with tech influencers. We all remember the brouhaha he created by publishing the business-sensitive internal emails provided to him by some randoid who hacked into Twitter’s email.And then there was his spirited defense…… Continue reading Facebook Finds Its PR Mojo