What’s next for the public relations industry? It’s not about the “next” Twitter or “Foursquare.” It is about bringing structure, focus and strategy to the idea of social. Below is my recent keynote for the PRSA Travel and Tourism (#travelPRSA) conference. Feel free to add your thoughts and opinions in the comments.
PRSA Travel [...]

Calling all Class of 2010 PR students. You’re probably looking for a job, right? I remember what it was like (and don’t miss it at all) In the spirit of Help a PR Pro Out (HAPPO), I want to help you find your dream job.

I will feature 15 of you wonderful job seekers [...]

Last night’s #journchat was inspired by The Shark Guys’ tongue-in-cheek post, 25 Ways to Save the Newspaper Industry. The purpose of the chat was not to portray the print (and their online counterpart) industry as a damsel in distress. We shared ideas, thoughts and tips to energize an industry and, of course, encourage others to [...]

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What can we do for our peers when times get tough? Start a campaign. That’s what Arik Hanson and Valerie Simon did with their upcoming movement, Help a PR Pro Out Day (#HAPPO). On Friday, February 19, from 10 am to 2 pm CST professionals and agencies from across the country will donate [...]

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Everyone is busier than you are. Did that catch you off guard? When I interact with someone I do my best (and it doesn’t always happen) to think this (changing “you” to “I”). It helps to keep me from saying, “I’m so busy…”
Part of the reason is because I dislike the glorification of [...]

Here are five new(er) tools and resources to add to your current artillery of public relations tactics. I test out new tools on a daily basis and do my best to share my findings via social networks. These are the top tools I viewed during November 2009:
Crowdcampaign
Crowdcampaign is a customizable way to launch and promote [...]

It was reported this morning that there are already 6.5 million Twitter lists. Impressive numbers. As the number of lists grows it will become increasingly difficult to decide which lists to follow. I’ve done a bit of research to get you started with a few popular lists.
You can easily view all lists related to journalism, [...]

AdWeek released an article today regarding Target’s recent accusation of false advertising for allegedly wrongly promoting ‘organic’ soymilk. Target is being targeted (pun intended) by The Cornucopia Institute, “alleging that Target was misleading consumers in its national newspaper advertisements for Silk.” (Target is also accused of wrongly promoting certain Archer Farms products as organic.)
As a [...]

It’s Monday night which means it’s #journchat. Tonight’s chat had approximately 168 professionals (with more than 1,000 tweets) who participated. A one-question poll tonight (taken by 90 of the participants) showed the following breakdown: 26 journalists, 38 PRs, 21 bloggers, 18 marketing professionals among others. While we asked nine questions during the chat, I’ve highlighted [...]

NOTE: If you’re a subscriber of Commentz, you may want to skip this post entirely.
In the daily e-recap I send to public relations professionals I include a “Thought for the day.” I write Commentz early in the morning which is also my reflection time. It’s a message, thought or question I pose to myself [...]

In November 2009, we’ll celebrate our one-year anniversary of #journchat. I can hardly believe it. This past year we’ve had featured guests Steve Brusk, CNN national assignment editor, Richard Laermer, Bad Pitch Blog, Adam Ostrow, editor of Mashable and tonight Jen Preston, social media editor at the New York Times. Thanks to all for joining [...]

This is an example of a really bad pitch which was targeted to me. Rather than out the person or focus on the negative (I did rant a bit on Facebook), let’s workshop this and make it a great pitch.

Without giving away too many details about the organization, here’s the background:
Non-profit fundraiser seeks to [...]

Guest post by: Valerie Merahn Simon serves as a Senior Vice President at BurrellesLuce media monitoring and measurement, and writes a national public relations column for examiner.com. She is also co-founder and host of #PRStudChat, a monthly twitter chat between PR professionals and students moderated by Deirdre Breakenridge. She can be found [...]

When someone in the public relations (PR) industry screws up, we all hear about it. Today is no different. Techcrunch published a post about a PR firm who hires people to pose as real customers of iPhone apps and generate positive comments. I’d like to believe the good pros out there know this is NOT [...]