Posted on January 4, 2011 2:05 pm by Shel Holtz | Marketing | PR
Way back in 1999, the Internet Press Guild published a guide for press relations titled “The Care and Feeding of the Press.” Introducing the guide to the PR audience at which it was aimed, Esther Schindler wrote:
You need us to cover the products you’re responsible for, whether they’re your own creations or you work for a public relations firm responsible for getting coverage for…
Posted on January 3, 2011 8:14 am by Shel Holtz | Books | For Immediate Release | PR
Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans, by Wendell Potter.
FIR book editor Bob LeDrew reviews “Deadly Spin” by former CIGNA PR executive Wednell Potter. According to Publisher’s Weekly, Potter “exposes the PR pros’ propaganda tricks—fake grass-roots organizations, bogus scientific studies—and recounts his shame-faced repentance. But he also trenchantly critiques the failure of America’s for-profit…
Posted on December 29, 2010 11:14 am by Shel Holtz | Media | PR
Back on December 21, Forrester Senior VP Josh Bernoff tweeted, “I’ve just received a mass email from a PR person offering me an ‘exclusive.’ Hmm…”
I replied, “So that would be first-come first-served?”
I wasn’t the only one who wondered how an exclusive could be offered via a mass email. Josh answered both me and Dan Lantowski, a Waggoner Edstrom account exec, by wondering if it’s even possible to offer an…
Posted on December 24, 2010 10:47 am by Shel Holtz | Business | PR | Social Media
I have, over the course of my career, been on both sides of the RFP equation. As a sender of RFPs, I have been dismayed by the lack of attention vendors have paid to the questions we wanted answered, opting instead to push their own agenda. On the recipient side, I’ve been bemused by the widely varying approaches companies take to…
Posted on December 14, 2010 2:12 pm by Shel Holtz | Crisis Communication | Facebook | PR | Social Media | Social networks
Whenever a company mishandles a social media kerfuffle, there is no shortage of bloggers and other experts ready to offer biting criticism and recommendations for how the organization should have handled the situation. Sometimes the advice is good, sometimes it’s not. The advice offered is rarely consistent from one expert to another. And it’s even more rarely forgiving of companies new to the…
Posted on November 15, 2010 11:23 am by Shel Holtz | PR
The definition of transparency I like most views it as access to information stakeholders need in order to make informed decisions. I don’t know that the public-at-large is one of the public relations profession’s stakeholders, but the decision many make about PR is that it helps clients spin bad news, deceiving the public and leading people to adopt positions contrary to their own…
Read The Full Post »