More humor PR myth busting

March 9, 2010

Part of my goal with this blog is to build a strong case for the use of humor in PR. Last week I read a great post by Brian Cross, a Managing Partner at Elasticity, titled: Does Humor Belong in PR? Brian is one of the geniuses behind the fake/real American Mustache Institute – one [...]

This van was a rockin’ and people came a knockin’

March 4, 2010

Not long ago I wrote about the boring press releases from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. And just when I thought all hope for creativity in marketing and PR was lost, I ran across a blog post written by Chris Brogan about a clever campaign put together by the folks at Griffin Technology called CES [...]

Want to succeed in PR? Grow a mustache

January 28, 2010

If you still need convincing that PR can pull off humor, take a good look at the American Mustache Institute.
AMI is the brainchild of three former Fleishman Hillard alums who created the fake institute to prove a point to their masters – that humor can be a serious public relations strategy.
The masters at Fleishman didn’t [...]

Humorwire: A Creative PR Playground

January 22, 2010

Based on the feedback from last week’s post, one thing appears to be clear: PR people want to be funny and creative but sometimes their clients or bosses won’t let them.
But does that mean you should suppress that creativity? No. Find an outlet for your talents and build a case study or two that will [...]

Are PR people boring or just bored?

January 13, 2010

I just finished reading the press releases from the Consumer Electronics Show. You’re probably wondering what kind of masochist would do such a thing. Well, I was looking for examples of companies that used humor (or creativity) in a press release at CES.
Sadly, I didn’t find any great examples. Some of them showed promise but [...]

A holiday wish from Guhmshoo

December 18, 2009

This is my final cartoon of the year. A big thanks to all of you for your support in 2009.
I have a holiday wish that I hope will come true in 2010: My wish is for PR professionals to integrate more humor into their work.
As I’ve written before, humor can be a powerful tool for [...]

Our top predictions for 2010

December 8, 2009

Warning! This is not your typical top prediction post. Stock prices will rise and fall based on what is written below.
To increase the accuracy of our predictions we opted against using Google search. Instead, we turned to Alta Vista (when it takes a full 5 minutes to calculate your search results, you know that it’s [...]

Maclaren: Case study in PR errors

November 17, 2009

In this age of product-recall overload, it’s easy to become inured to the daily flow of releases from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But if there’s one exception, it would be the recall of about 1 million baby strollers last week by Maclaren, the gold standard of its industry.
Much has been written about this issue–which [...]

Peter Shankman’s bold idea

November 11, 2009

I just finished reading Peter Shankman’s “Can We Do That? Outrageous PR Stunts That Work and Why Your Company Needs Them.” For those who don’t know him, Shankman is best known as the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO), a fast-growing free service that connects expert sources with the media. Before that he ran [...]

The absurdity of embargoes

November 1, 2009

This Halloween I was visited by a demon that has haunted me for decades. It was brought to mind by this Tweet from Tom Foremski, an old pro from the Financial Times: “Are there new rules for embargoes? I’m not sure if there are…”
If there’s one subject that will always elicit a frothing response from [...]

On salaries, don’t pass the buck

October 29, 2009

Even in the days when prosperous newspaper companies seemed to print money along with the news–an increasingly distant memory–some recent revelations about top editorial salaries would have arched more than a few green-shaded brows.
First there were reports that former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger was pulling down a cool $570,000 at ProPublica [...]

The dumbing down of media

October 23, 2009

Countless articles are written every day decrying the demise of journalism and all of democracy along with it, but many of them are little more than personal rants from recently unemployed journalists or romanticized writings that pine for a “Front Page” era that never really existed in our lifetime.
One observation made in various venues lately [...]

How to safely inject humor into PR

October 14, 2009

When I worked at a PR agency, it was serious business. By this I mean humor rarely seeped into the client’s work. This was not because the client couldn’t appreciate it. It just wasn’t done. You want to be funny, go work for an ad agency.
This was unfortunate because I saw so many client campaigns [...]

Friday funny: FTC vs. bloggers

October 9, 2009

Earlier this week, the FTC provided some additional guidelines on sponsored posts. The gist was this: If you fail to disclose your connection between advertisers and endorsers you could be looking at a fine of up to $11,000 per incident.
But it seems those additional guidelines may have been misinterpreted, according to a report yesterday by [...]

Hybrid media species discovered

September 30, 2009

Only a scant few months since publishing the first “Field Guide to Common Journalists,” Newsvetter’s media anthropologists have turned up an exciting new species.
This hitherto undiscovered genus is something of a hybrid, neither fish (journalist) nor fowl (PR rep) by classic definition. Instead, it appears to represent a nascent breed [...]

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