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 [...]

Friday funny: Seth Godin Is Not Evil, he’s EEEEVIIIILLLL

September 25, 2009

I’ve been following the uproar over Brands in Public these past few days on Twitter and the blogs. There are a lot of disappointed people out there (I’ve tried to capture the prevailing sentiment in the toon featured on the right).
I don’t know Seth Godin all that well. I never finished his book Tribes. I’ve [...]

Learn to love your links

September 23, 2009

If you’re old enough to remember when the web was called the Information Highway, you may recall a site called Suck.com. It was an irreverent daily zine (remember those?) launched in the summer of 1995 with the irresistible inscription, “a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun.”
Yet what I recall appreciating most about Suck was [...]

Boeing breaks the news barrier

September 15, 2009

As much as we’re tempted to rant yet again about the inanity of press releases, we at Newsvetter have promised ourselves to stay focused on the positive ever since our last blood-pressure checkup.
To that end, we herewith officially laud Boeing for adopting a new way to provide information that forgoes the dreaded e-mail blast that [...]

The PR-ad-marketing quibble

September 8, 2009

Try as I might to keep from getting hooked on “Mad Men,” I’ve finally succumbed. There’s something irresistible about an era when cigarettes and alcoholic “refreshments” were acceptable at office meetings any time of day.
But at one such gathering, something other than the Camels and Gibsons caught my attention. It was a pitch to [...]

We need a swine flu newsroom

September 1, 2009

My kids are starting kindergarten in a few days, but the lump in my throat isn’t a bittersweet reaction to seeing my boys leave the nest. Rather, it’s from a fear that they’ll come back infected with the swine flu.
According to local news reports, Oregon state health officials are warning that “40 [...]

Could humor have saved Brody PR?

August 21, 2009

Just to be clear. Brody PR screwed up and deserved to be outed. But I believe humor could have saved them.
As blunders go it was a doozy, but did anyone get offended or hurt? No. Other than irritating a few influential social media folks during their busy day, it was harmless. In other words, here’s [...]

PR’s love affair with press releases

August 12, 2009

If there’s anybody who has developed a successful model for charging for news content, it’s the PR industry.
In 2007, press releases represented a $2.2 billion market, according to Fortune. This figure only covers distribution through companies such as PR Newswire and PR Web. It does not include the cost to write and pitch them to [...]

Monsanto needs a reality check

August 4, 2009

Like many kids who visited Disneyland in the ’60s and ’70s, I always remembered Monsanto’s “Adventure Thru Inner Space,” an exhibit that pretended to shrink its visitors to microscopic size and examine them with a giant eyeball as they exited. (We became particularly familiar with it after my frugal father learned that it was [...]

What PR can learn from squirrels

July 30, 2009

Cutbacks are to be expected in any economic downturn, but the Great Recession has forced many companies to rethink fundamental operations in the name of survival. This includes even departments once considered sacrosanct, such as legal services.
Gone are the days of fat monthly retainers and unlimited billable hours. An increasingly common strategy among many companies [...]

Forget about the New York Times

July 21, 2009

You may not know it, but there are some close parallels between PR and the real estate business these days. A blog on PowerSites, an online real estate listing company, offers an observation to this point that is admittedly self-serving but no less true:
“Over the last few years I have spoken to many Realtors who [...]

Be ruthless for your own good

July 16, 2009

If there is any doubt that the idea of a corporate news site can work for almost any type of business, consider the ISC Newsroom: It’s a sugar company.
Not just any sugar company, but “an authoritative voice in the sugar industry–U.S., Mexico, and elsewhere … a one-stop shop for the best thinking and views on [...]

When writing blogs, less is more

July 14, 2009

Larry Ingrassia, the business editor of the New York Times, recently quoted two opening paragraphs from front-page stories on 1987’s “Black Monday” in response to a reader’s question.
The first was from Gray Lady herself: “Stock market prices plunged in a tumultuous wave of selling yesterday, giving Wall Street its worst day in history and raising [...]

Step away from the keyboard

July 9, 2009

Mike and I had a rather pointed discussion the other day about a New York Times piece on Silicon Valley PR that raised hackles throughout the industry.
I felt that we needed to add our voice to the conversation, as the blogs and feeds were afire over it. Mike countered that there were too many [...]

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