In principle, I thought that the State of Blog Relations survey, which was commissioned by the Council of Public Relations Firms (CPRF) and APCO Worldwide to look at the interactions and relationships between public relations (PR) professionals and bloggers was interesting. I especially thought that the disconnect between the two camps was compelling, with just over half of the PR PR executives surveyed agreeing with the statement: Our firm does a good job identifying the specific interests of individual bloggers and sending them relevant information.” However, nearly two-thirds of read more...
CoolTools: AllTop is a Great Research Tool to Find Blogs in Vertical Markets
The makers of Truemors have launched AllTop, which is a site that claims to aggregate the headlines of "top" blogs in 21 categories, one being a link to POPURLS, which is the site on which AllTop was modeled. According to the story, the Truemors gang noticed they got as much traffic from POPURLS as from Google. This got us thinking about other topics that (a) have a large readership and (b) hasn’t been aggregated in an elegant and efficient manner, and we came up with idea of a doing a popurls of celebrity gossip sites. Then one read more...
Best Practices: 10 Tips for Reaching Out to Social Media Influencers
Over the past few months, a string of people that I consider to be very knowledgeable about social media have started to publicly complain about people who claim to be social media "experts." The problem is that many of these self appointed "experts" haven't earned their stripes and haven't proven read more...
Shel Israel Decries Being Pitched by PR Hacks, Says ‘Enough is Enough’
While Shel Israel, co-author of the book Naked Conversations, admits that some public relations professionals are among his favorite bloggers, he is also fed up with what he calls a "bevy of bad PR pitches." My experience is that an increasing number of PR folk are trying to treat bloggers as media. They want to find the 3-5 highest ranked topical bloggers and get hits that can be converted to clips." In his usual charming way, he offers some advice that those read more...
Public Relations is Customer Service
When I was working at a trade association, I remember an incident where a woman called me to complain about a bad experience she had as a customer to the industry in which I was working. I listened to her tell me about it, all the while wondering what I could do about it given that I didn't work for the company in question and they weren't even a member at the national level. After we hung up, I called the state association where the woman lived, and who did have a relationship with the company in question, to see how they would recommend read more...