I am extremely proud to announce my very first article on Everything PR, one of my favorite blogs covering PR and marketing and run by my very good friends Mihaela Lica and Phil Butler. Here’s a sneak peak for you:

Private Garbage, the New Pseudo-gold Mine of Personal Branding

I thought keeping your dirty laundry away from the media was the key to success in the world of the famous, be it actors, singers, politicians or sport stars. And, the Tiger Woods media circus causing him to loose a lot of advertising gigs is partial proof for my point of view. Years ago it was not so fashionable to be rumored to have slept with X and Y famous colleague, substance abuse, abandoning your children, cheating on your spouse, and etc., these things were career stoppers – but things have changed

To read the entire article, click here. I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on it on the Everything PR blog!

If there is one thing I’ve learned about PR is that there’s always something new to learn. And you find lessons in all possible places, such as learning about word of mouth from stray dogs. One of the best resources for new things to learn are your clients. While working with them, you’ll discover PR mistakes and PR goldmines. You will brainstorm and get to implement ideas that you’d never considered possible.

But while this is obvious, the link to knowledge run deeper. When you work with a client for a longer period, you get to know their partners and their clients. You learn about their issues, the mistakes they made and what they did that worked as a charm. If they come from different parts of the world, you will be receiving extremely valuable tips on intercultural communication.

So when you’re getting ready for your next meeting with your client, their customers or their partners, remember to keep your eyes and years open. I for one have learned a lot about crisis management from clients who’ve never been through a crisis, but whose target market was prone to PR disasters

What valuable PR and marketing lessons have you learned from your clients, your partners or from people you’ve worked with?

Yes, lots of Coca-Cola going on in movies and series, as well as drinks, fashion brands and anything you’d ever think of. I am sure you all remember the Bridget Jones cheering on a huge screen. Or the Apple computers in Zoolander. But does product placement still work for popular movies and TV series?

I have to say I’ve started to overlook a lot of it. From clothes, to what they’re drinking or some of the gadgets they’re using. Then again, it also depends on how much the brand is shown off! If someone types behind a laptop for over 3 minutes, I might notice the brand. Or if you keep showing the computer game box each time you show the kid’s room, I might see it’s Heroes V Especially if I was a fan of Heroes III and IV

But other than that, do you buy something just because it’s shown on a TV screen but not during advertisement breaks? Is it a more effective advertising method? I mean, really, would you switch to the Head & Shoulders shampoo just because it was used to kill aliens in a rather silly movie?

I for one think it happens as it happens to all advertising: we learn to ignore it and it’s just wasted money. Are there any successful campaigns? Do you know of any and have you ever bought something just because you saw it in a movie?

When we tweet something, a thought, a piece of information, we expect two things: starting a few conversations and getting retweets. Both are valuable, but while the first goal implies our community, the retweet part implies reaching out to more people and getting more views and opinions on what we have just sent into the Twitterverse.

So saying retweets are important is a bit of an understatement. And while we all try to read tips and tricks and find new strategies to have more retweets, I thought a road back to the basics of it all might help. And I asked myself: why do people retweet? And here’s a list of reasons I found:

• they find the tweet funny
• they’ve been through a similar situation – positive or negative. I should add here that when it’s a negative review, they tend to retweet more, compared to positive reviews of products and services
• they are interested in the topic and their community shares the interest
• they find your take on the matter unique and intriguing
• they are your raving supporters and like to promote your work
• they find it easier to add a quick comment to the retweet than post a longer comment on your blog
• they return favors

And now let’s get the comment-party started! What about you? Why do you retweet? Why do you think your followers retweet your articles and news?

Websites have been around for so long, we imagine everyone has gotten the hang of the basic rules of usability. But apparently they didn’t! So here are three important things you should consider if you care about your visitors at all. And you should care, especially if you’re selling something through your website.

1. Stop making the www compulsory! People are lazy. They will always prefer to type name.com instead of www.name.com. Yes, most websites respect this rule, but there are still some parts of the Internet where people like to pretend it ain’t that important. It is! People will think your site is down first, then consider other possibilities, like needing to type three more letters.

2. Your site should at least work on major browsers! That’s IE and Firefox. Don’t believe me? Check your Google analytics or whatever tracking software you’re using. See what browsers your visitors are using. And make sure your site works on the most frequently used ones. If it just works on IE, you’ll let a lot of people down.

3. Don’t make advertising more annoying than it already is! Yes, we have come to ignore most ads. So stop making them extremely annoying by allowing them to impair navigation on your site. If you add a close button to an ad, then it should work, the ad should not open again when I try to click a menu button.

These rules are based on what I find most annoying when browsing online and trying to dig information on websites. What would you add to the list?

Why is a hotel always full while the next door one is empty, although they offer the same services at comparable prices? Why does a certain video game convince millions to play it, while others struggle with a lot less buyers, although they are a bit cheaper? Why does an IT product sell, while others don’t, although they provide similar features? Why do you need an appointment made weeks in advance for some beauty salons and you need none for others, as their personnel seems to always be waiting for customers that never come?

It’s easy; people are not buying products and services only. They buy experiences which include those products and services. Everything else going on while they are researching, testing and buying is of ultimate importance, just as how they are treated after getting the product or service and they come back to either buy more or require assistance.

It’s all part of a complex process. The experience is what matters and what makes you stand out. You need to build it, then promote it, then live up to what expectations you’ve created every time. A few quick examples! There’s no software product that’s flawless. If you start using it intensively, you will run across some bugs or some missing feature. That’s not a problem, we’ve all learned to expect it. But if the tech support fails to fix the problem once you’ve asked them to, or fail to properly explain things to you, you will change products.

Think of a spa. You pay for great products, relaxation, but could you relax if let’s say someone giving you a massage would be rude to you? Or at a hair dresser’s, if you look great in the end but the person has been pulling your hair all the time, bringing tears of pain in your eyes, will you ever come back?

It all seems easy to grasp, everyone is preaching it, but most companies seem to be overlooking this important aspect. Even if they offer these complete experiences to their customers, they fail to properly promote them. They get caught up in features and innovation and high tech and they forget to translate the benefits to their customers. They fail to explain how the entire process works and how they will be assisted every step of the way. And I have to wonder why. If the information is out there, if when we go buy something we evaluate the entire experience, why do we fail to translate everything we know in our own businesses?

I have always been intrigued by the relationship Romanians have had with their car brand, Dacia. It is the only brand that still exists and that did not disappear after the Revolution that put an end to communism. But the way we’ve seen the brand, the way we’ve related to it or chosen to ignore it, makes for a very interesting story.

Dacias were not the best of cars during the communist period.  But they were one of the few types of cars you could actually get. Long lists and long waits came before any car purchase. And when I say long wait, I mean years. But then again, that gave you time to raise the money for it. The design was outdated, there weren’t that many options to choose from, and some relatives told me some now funny stories about how they prayed for their car to arrive with most of the parts on it.

After the Revolution, we finally had choices. And we went for them. Foreign cars, used at first, brought from nearby countries, Germany being the leading supplier. I grew up with high-school friends that made a business out of driving to Germany in one car and returning in three. They would work on them for a while, then resell them for some extra cash.

Old school Dacia, Sandero and Duster

Everyone thought of new Dacias (which came with a slightly updated design and a few more features) as cheap, but ultimately bad cars and they bought them only because they found nothing better. Then came Renault, which bought Dacia in 1999. Soon came the Logan brand and things started to change in how Romanians perceived the cars.

Yet there still were plenty saying they’d buy anything else. With rather strong competition on the market, the number of choices was still extremely large and with a negligible price difference. But of course, the Renault brand standing behind Dacia meant something.

In recent years, the Logan and the Sandero brands have changed perception even more. They are top selling cars and Dacia is one of the most profitable companies in the Renault group. We had to see that Brazil, Germany and other European countries love our cars for us to start loving and consider them as a strong alternative. I have to admit that I am now making plans around a new 4×4 announced by Dacia and Renault, Duster, and I would love to have one!

Was there another way to get us to support Dacia sooner? Was there something more than the price that they could have shown us? Definitely! We grew up seeing Dacia as crappy. Maybe all the reactions from other countries should have been brought to our attention sooner, more often, until we were no longer trapped in what we thought we knew and we could have given Dacia a chance.

No matter how we got here, I am happy to hear Romanians are proud of their car brand. They smile when they hear how well Sandero is doing on the international market and they are looking forward to see what’s next. I for one heard of a very cheap car running on electricity. Rumor has it it will cost about 5000 Euros.

While browsing through my LinkedIn account, I just noticed this question about apps that allow you to schedule tweets. Some of the answers stated no one should ever schedule tweets, as it is spammy. Automation is bad, don’t do it. And I started wondering. Is it really spam? Or is it just a way to make work easier and give your followers a break? And the answer is, like always, it depends

I should first say I manage a few Twitter accounts. On some I schedule tweets, on others I don’t. On those who are there to provide news on a certain topic, I do schedule tweets. I usually find the news all at once and just sending them all out at ones is actually more spammy to some users than scheduling them throughout the day. That does not mean I ignore the conversation. I check the stream every couple of hours, check what others are saying, retweet, reply, thank people for their comments and retweets.

When it comes to blog post, a lot of what I write is scheduled. And when I set the publishing time and date, I also set the tweet. Basically because I tend to get caught up and I might forget. I do check it, I do interact, as I said before. And I really don’t think programming tweets is a form of spam.

When all your tweets are programmed and you are never there to talk, reply or answer questions, it is definitely spam. You are there to broadcast more or less forcefully whatever you please and you really don’t care what your followers have to say. But from that to saying any form of automation and of rendering your work fast and effective is spam is a long road to be traveled.

What bout you? Do you schedule tweets? Do you think it’s spam when others do it? Should we ban all automation, good or bad from social media? I say not, yet it all needs to be approached with great care. And over to you…

RSS might very well be one of the most overlooked technologies out there. We all use it, to read, to get content on different pages, to promote our content and our influence, but we rarely talk about it, there are a handful of articles on strategies, best practices and the likes. But there are special plugins to enhance your feed, there is RSS feed advertising, there are buttons showing RSS readers numbers. So here’s the paradox: if the technology is actually important, why do we fail to talk about it?

As it happens to some technologies, they are extremely useful, but lack a certain coolness factor, so we ignore them. We use them, we appreciate their value, but they are almost nonexistent in what we say, write or recommend. And then a comment someone makes that they have subscribed to an RSS feed reminds us that we depend on it!

For example, the RSS technology powers the following for me:

• my blogs’ feeds, which makes them easier to keep up with for my readers
• my reading list – blogs, online magazines, you name it, I have subscribed and I check their feed daily. I only go on their website to comment, tweet the article if I find it relevant for those following me or download something if needed,
• promote content – my blog feed is on my LinkedIn page, Facebook page and a bunch of other profiles I have created all over the internet. The RSS delivered version of what I publish here is definitely a more powerful hook than a simple link.

We claim it’s dead, we say it’s not earth-shaking, but how would our lives be without RSS? Wouldn’t we still need a tool to help us keep up with everything that’s published in our field, wouldn’t we need some way to plug in to our blog content from other pages? I know for sure I wouldn’t be able to create new notes for all my posts, I’d forget a few time, and would stop sharing on Facebook. I know I would probably bookmark the several hundreds of blogs I currently read, but would fail miserably at reading them each time they publish something.

How about you? What do you use RSS for? Would you miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? And most importantly, why do you think we’d ignore what’s clearly useful technology just because it’s not as cool or as trendy as others, sometimes less useful, newcomers?

The past couple of weeks have brought in quite a few articles and blog posts about driving traffic as the new leverage of PR professionals. Pitch the story and have the traffic to back your pitch. But is this practice really new? Haven’t PR professionals already been driving traffic to online stories? I know I have and I doubt I’m the only one.

What stories do we drive traffic to? Well, almost anything showing up online.

Product/service reviews – all independent reviews, neutral and positive, are a gold mine for PR and Marketing pros. They are seen as objective points of view by customers and the bigger the publication, the more valuable the endorsement. Reviews are usually posted in a special website section, added to newsletters, used as literature to close new deals, twittered and blogged.

Interviews, press release coverage, other articles – these are also sent out to partners and customers. They are a great way to support the company’s image and the team’s values, and their being made public through media coverage gives them more credibility. If CEOs are interviewed and also have twitter streams or blogs, they will be advised to mention them and link to them. If not, the corporate blog will do. There are also media sections on most business sites linking to all these stories.

Blog reviews – these are sometimes promoted as much or even more than the magazine/newspaper reviews for a simple reason: they are personal. They are sometimes more vivid and describe a real life experience, sometimes with much detail, less focused on steps and stages than those written by journalists who have done dozens of reviews in the past month alone.

The reasons to drive traffic to all stories published online is simple: it helps build trust, it helps position products and services in a certain way, it boosts your partners’ efforts to promote your offers as they are definitely reliable and well received by the media (and they surely see a possibility for local media to cover their company’s stories if their valued partner is such a hyped up topic). Other than that, all interviews make the company representatives identifiable and thus make the business look human. It’s no longer a faceless entity; there are people all customers can approach, even if only in theory.

As I said before, this is definitely nothing new. Some of us have been doing this for a while. But I doubt we have properly used it when reaching out to journalists. Saying something like “publish my story and I’ll get hundreds of readers who are genuinely interested in the topic for it” sounds a bit like forcing their hand. Yet is it so? If the product is no good, if the story isn’t interesting, they won’t bother. But if they incline to publish it, the idea of incoming traffic might just suddenly make the story more important. The more words they publish, the more chances it would be an important enough coverage for the PR professional to promote it.

It sounds devious. But is it? Journalists and bloggers alike already publish stories based on what they can bring to their websites. Would the story interest readers, would it bring new ones? They have a clear picture of what there is for them to gain from each story they run. They are not in the business of making anyone favors. The bigger your brand, the bigger the coverage, even for lousy stories (and I can give you a few examples if you’d like), just because readers are interested in such brands, not to make said big corporations happy. So why not finally admit what a company can do for a certain medium, old or new, is important? Why not be open about it and state you, as a PR professional, can and will drive traffic to a published story?