The journalists vs. PR professionals war has been going on for decades. It is fueled by frustration, impatience, beginners in both fields, moral high grounds being taken over every day and powers beyond your imagination, such as trends, traffic and boredom.

The two opposing armies

Journalists – mostly overworked, tired, frustrated, bored of seeing the same announcement and questions and mistakes over and over again. In control of powerful mass destruction weapons (revealing dozens of spammers in their magazines) or targeted, refined technology (taking it out on a certain individual).

PR professionals - a joint force of company employees and agency staffers; mostly overworked, tired, frustrated, bored of seeing their story dropped for hard to grasp reasons. Wielding powerful weapons such as exclusives, hot stories, tips and inside information Continue reading

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When you are the face of a company, you can say good-bye to having a personal life. Well, you will still live it, but anything you do will impact the company you’re representing. If you’re caught driving while drunk, if you get into a fight or get arrested for any reason whatsoever, it will impact the company. If you make racist or other hateful comments, if your clothes are inappropriate, if your kids do something wrong, it will impact the company. That’s a fact. What’s unclear is how a company representative’s mishaps or mistakes or eccentricities will actually affect the business.

In some cases, customer lose their trust in the company. If the person speaking in their behalf was a thief, what guarantee is there the company isn’t also stealing. In other cases, such as Facebook, a movie showing the CEO acting like a careless smart ass that is more interested in his company than in his friends or any human relationship for that matter might actually have no negative impact. Facebook users are either inspired to go for it all, too addicted to Facebook to give it up, or find that not using the service will affect them more than using it, in a word, they’re being practical. Continue reading

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Guest post by Neel

The mainline for hype in the PR industry for some time now has been “social media”. Whether or not this is actually achieving the sort of results which would qualify for the glowing endorsements of social sites as the “future of media” is another matter. The PR industry has in fact been pretty slow to pick up on the social sites, and actually it was market research, not PR, which really opened up the subject to debate. Like SEO, the PR industry was pretty lethargic about seeing the potential for development of social sites, and it’s only recently that social sites have been getting serious attention.

PR, issues and social media

Slothful or not, PR has now latched on to Twitter as a meaningful source of information. The fact that client interests can literally be tracked second by second, and any feedback, controversy or other issues properly monitored has been the main factor. A belated revelation, perhaps, but it’s becoming clear that PR is getting value out of the Twitterings of the world. Continue reading

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There are many ways in which a company can end up looking bad in front of customers, the press, or just about everyone. And it seem that this week I am prompted to explore many of them.

Finding the right companies and the right people to help your business grow is always a great idea. Hiring a great HR manager to make sure your staff is top notch, hiring the write PR and marketing agency, these are complicated tasks that not all companies get right.

But once you hire someone that’s really good at what they do, make sure you are familiar with the campaigns they run for you! Imagine this: one of the sites I sometimes write for gets this great targeted email proposing a very interesting contest . The message is well written, it’s clear they did some research before and you can’t wait to get started. Unfortunately, you want to have the story published by the end of the day and the person contacting you did not answer. You pick up the phone and call the company behind the campaign – they don’t know who the person is, what the campaign is about and their marketing officer is not in. Continue reading

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When trying to sell a product or service, the hardest part is to convince your potential customers they need it, want it or can actually use it to make their life better. A lot of effort goes into marketing and PR, engaging people, outlining the benefits, making sure what you’re selling pops up exactly when and where they would be happy to see it.

Let’s say this part of the process went really great and the customer is convinced. They would then go to your website, fill out the order form… and you might think there is no way in hell to lose that paying customer right now! Continue reading

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