Posted on October 4, 2004 7:58 am by Shel Holtz | External
Communicators are constantly lamenting that their profession just isn’t taken seriously. Some people insist that it isn’t even a profession since there’s no certification involved (certification being notably different from accreditation). You have to wonder about the validity of that claim sometimes, particularly when you read newspaper articles like the one I just finished from the Vancouver Sun about the Hell’s Angels’ public…
Posted on October 1, 2004 4:27 am by Shel Holtz | External
An article from Business 2.0 notes that, of the millions of blogs populating the Web, about 5,000 are “serious corporate blogs that…have the backing and at least some participation of management.”
Given that a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds, and that 11% of all Internet users have read or contributed to blogs, “it’s no surprise that marketers want a piece of the action,” the article…
Posted on September 24, 2004 8:23 am by Shel Holtz | External
This week I’m the guest speaker at a graduate PR program in Maryland. It’s a virtual classroom and the grad students pose their questions on a message board. One student asked why public relations has such a bad reputation. I replied that bad PR gets a lot of press while professional, ethical communicators do their jobs without anyone shining a spotlight on them.…
Posted on September 20, 2004 7:49 am by Shel Holtz | External
Money is behind the National Hockey League’s lockout of its players. A planned, coordinated public relations effort is behind the public support for the league. So reports the Globe and Mail in an article titled NHL takes the early lead in public-relations spin game. In addition to the league’s internal PR staff, New York PR rep Howard Rubenstien—who represents the New York Yankees and…
Posted on September 18, 2004 3:30 pm by Shel Holtz | External
In the wake of a scandal, renaming your organization can be a most effective gambit, according to an Washington Post article appearing in several newspapers today. The article lists several companies that have undergone post-crisis name changes, including ValuJet (AirTrans) and Worldcomm (MCI). I can think of a few others, including Anderson Consulting (Accenture), which wasn’t the focus of a scandal, but…
Posted on September 16, 2004 1:09 pm by Shel Holtz | External
Search Engine Watch (SEW) certainly isn’t the first to do it, but the popular Web site’s adoption of a blog as a means of communicating current news could easily make this use of blogs more evident to others.
MediaMap was the first to do it (at least the first I was aware of), using a blog to post updates about media moves as…
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