The Friday Wrap #1: Search upgrades, gamification, blacklisted apps and Twitter email

I review a lot of content during the week. Much of it comes from curated collections I follow, such as Smart Briefs. I get email updates from several sites, like AdAge and ZD Net. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of hundreds of blogs. I check the links that cross my Twitter stream, thanks to my Paper.li daily. I click through a lot of items shared over Google+ and Facebook. The ones I find interesting, I publish to my link blog on Tumblr. Some of these find their way into blog posts. A couple make it into my reports on the podcast I co-host with Neville Hobson, For Immediate Release. The rest…well, they just sit there on my link blog.

… Read More »

Who needs the press to make sure a press release gets the word out?

This morning I learned that Vocus, the public relations services company, has acquired email marketer iContact.

That Vocus would add email marketing to its portfolio is interesting enough, but for now, let’s focus on how I found out about the acquisition.

Not too long ago, I would have read about it in the business section of my daily newspaper, in my weekly edition of PRWeek or in my RSS feeds.

The business section of my daily newspaper has shrunk to the point that there’s no room for such reporting in the print edition. Increasingly, we’re seeing paywalls blocking online content from all but paying subscribers. As more and more… Read More »

Altimeter Group proves the embargo is alive and well, when done right

To hear some tell it, the press embargo is dead.

It’s not, of course. I’ve written before that the embargo, when executed correctly, is a respected and useful tool. It thrives outside of the technology world. In medicine, where major journals publish comprehensive studies, embargoes are routine.

The key requirement for an effective embargo is an agreement between the news outlet and the news provider. I routinely get emails from PR agencies containing a press release along with an embargo restriction. I am under no obligation to honor that embargo, since I didn’t agree to it in the first place. I’ve never published any of this… Read More »

Curating company news: Time for company content curation to grow up

There’s plenty of evidence that business is adopting content curation, but the practice hasn’t been around long enough for organizations to innovate more targeted, results-focused uses.

Business takes many of its lessons from how everyone else makes use of social tools. To start applying content curation, communicators need to pay attention to how others are using the crop of curation tools that have found acceptance online. There are dozens of free tools, but Storify is the one that has demonstrated one of curation’s emerging strengths:

Curating news that the media isn’t covering can lead to media coverage. And, by extension, it can… Read More »

Every newsroom should be a social media newsroom

It must have been 1995 or so when my friend Charles Pizzo was on a train somewhere. Neither of our memories are able to retrieve the precise route of that train, but we do remember that Charles got off at a stop to use a pay phone to check in with his office.

At the time, he and his colleague were the principals of P.R. PR, and Charles was representing Bayou Steel in a labor situation.  Bayou Steel had just filed some kind of legal proceeding. Charles’s admin told him a reporter was looking for a copy of the filing to be delivered to him by courier. Charles had a copy with him and wouldn’t be able to send it until he’d arrived at his… Read More »

Guest post: Curating news about the company for the intranet

During a recent talk on content curation, I showed a page from American Electric Power’s intranet that included news about the company from external sources. Several in the audience wondered how the communicators at AEP curated that content, so I asked Internal Communications Director William Amurgis for a quick rundown. Instead, he replied with an email that was good enough to be a blog post—and William gave me his permission to turn it into one.

by William Amurgis
Director, Internal Communications, American Electric Power

We’ve explored automated feeds over the years, and found them to be either too inclusive (too many redundant or… Read More »

Page 1 of 29 pages  1 2 3 >  Last ›