2006-02-15
Posted on February 15, 2006 6:00 pm by Shel Holtz
| External
Reading an item from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I was reminded of one of the comments submitted to Jeremy Zawodny’s blog after he blasted a Silicon Valley PR agency for allegedly spamming him. The comment (by “Aimee”) read:
There are a few things to address here. Yes, it’s really bad form to send an unsolicited email to any journalist or blogger….certainly a letter of introduction or phone call would be an appropriate start. But every PR firm will hire the occasional “twinkie” who may or may not take the easiest route to completing a job task. It happens. It’s a mistake I imagine most PR newbies make once or twice.
How young do… Read More »
2006-02-03
Posted on February 3, 2006 9:29 am by Shel Holtz
| General
The Los Angeles Times has come up with an intriguing new use for a tag cloud. The Times’ online version features two clouds, one for US President George W. Bush’s recent 2006 State of the Union address, the other for his 2002 speech.
A tag cloud generally refers to a visual weighted list of a website’s tags. According to the Wikipedia listing…
Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible.
You see tag clouds in places like Flickr, highlighting the most clicked-on tags;… Read More »
2006-01-20
Posted on January 20, 2006 3:24 pm by Shel Holtz
| General
I wrote recently about Jim Horton’s proposal for calling out PR practitioners who use spam as a means of content distribution. “Whenever a PR firm spams any PR blogger, we out the firm in our blogs and brand them with a Scarlet S for spammer,” Jim suggested. Fast on the heels of that suggestion comes The Bad Pitch Blog. Outing PR practitioners is the goal, but spam isn’t the focus. As the title suggests, authors Kevin Dugan and Richard Laermer want to expose practitioners who give the rest of us a bad name by making clueless and stupid pitches. (Don’t you love blogs with titles that actually describe what they’re about? What…you don’t… Read More »
2006-01-19
Posted on January 19, 2006 5:52 pm by Shel Holtz
| General
Why no posts before now, nearly 4 p.m.? Because my technology betrayed me. At times like this, I long for the simpler days when the worst thing about technology was changing a typewriter ribbon. (I’m getting all nostalgic.)
Neville, who’s in Copenhagen, called me at around 9:30 a.m. my time, 5:30 p.m. his, to record our podcast, “For Immediate Release, The Hobson and Holtz Report.” The recording went just fine, a relief since Neville was using the hotel’s free high-speed connection. When we were done, I played back some of the recording from the Marantz PMD-660 digital recorder. It sounded fine. I connected the PMD-660 to my Mac… Read More »
2006-01-11
Posted on January 11, 2006 10:17 am by Shel Holtz
| Blogging
There are scads of approaches we can take to rehabilitate the image of the public relations profession. One of them is self-policing. This can be handled by the associations that represent the profession (should they ever decide to put teeth in their ethics policies) or by individual practitioners. I like the idea of speaking up—I’ve done some of it myself on this blog and in my podcast. But I’m a bit troubled by Jim Horton’s modest proposal.
Jim is one of the smartest PR guys I know and his blog is one of the more thoughtful (dare I say cerebral?) among those in the PR blogging space. He was also blogging about PR before there were… Read More »
2006-01-09
Posted on January 9, 2006 9:56 am by Shel Holtz
| General
I think I’ll write an article about router configuration. I know a tiny bit about routers, so I could probably sound a little like I know what I’m talking about. I’m a good enough writer that I could make it sound authoritative. Why not? Over at JupiterMedia’s Datamation website, IT writer Paul Chin has written an article about corporate communications. It’s superficial, misses key points that any entry-level communicator would catch, and paints a narrow picture of the process. If an IT person can write about corporate communications, I can write about IT.
Chin’s article is titled The Evolution of Corporate Communications, but it’s… Read More »
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