PRBreakfastClub

Despite all of my love for social media, digital communications, community engagement etc., something that is beginning to particularly strike me as a clear fact of 21st-century PR is that yes, media relationships do matter. A whole lot. And dare I say it? It does matter who you know. More importantly, how well you know/trust them.

Let me put this into a bit more perspective: Say you’re working on a pretty time sensitive client announcement that has a lot of moving parts (e.g. 2-3 parties involved with multiple executives/personalities and many different times zones), which requires you to be both confidential with how closely you hold the client announcement/information and also proactive enough so you obtain the desired outcome from the announcement with a little extra audience reaction thrown in from a good pre-announcement story or two. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, so I’ll admit it . . . I wrote this post a while back called “Give it Away . . . For Free!” sharing how free advice will ultimately pay off and bring good karma. And yes, I still stand by everything I wrote. But perhaps I’m seeing business bottom line with more of an ice cold eye than I once did.

On an episode of Kell on Earth, Kelly Cutrone struggles with people constantly asking for free advice, actually taking a cell phone call from the uncle of her daughter’s school friend. He inquired about his own business (whatever it was) and asked what he should be doing. But, Cutrone owns her own business (People’s Revolution) and she has to worry about paying her employees and getting food on the table for her seven year old daughter (oh, and paying for her country house in France…technicality). Constantly dolling out free advice sets her back in her day taking away valuable time from her paying clients. Read the rest of this entry »