Category Archives: Tim Otis

PR Pro’s New Title: Content Marketers

Is it me or is PR not actually evolving and instead completely disappearing?

It’s safe to say that you can start calling all PR people “marketers.” Why? We’re all about marketing strategy now; we’re not just relating to publics but trying to learn how people tick, how they’ll be moved to purchase or pass along something – based on research and continuous analysis found in deep dives into social networks and by reading a vast amount of blog posts on the topic. The practice of PR has traditionally been built upon persuasion, but persuasion isn’t accurate.  Continue reading

With Your Twitter Pitch, Where’s the Timehook?

Oh Twitter… receiving a suck notice , being told it has a stickiness problem. Are you really still useful to PR pros, if not just for helping us craft more weighty headlines in 140 characters? Besides the obvious observations for how a tweet helps PR pros pitch more effectively, one thing is definitely overlooked and it’s something I stumbled upon just today: the timehook. Continue reading

Favoriting Tweets: The Easiest Way To Keep Up on All Your Social Media/PR News Reading

Time and time again, the simplicity of Twitter has been undermined. And simplicity is a beautiful thing when noise in social networks is never going to go away. Even stories in the news might be considered “noise” because, while trying to be relevant, they fail to catch on with the majority. Or maybe it’s the fact that people never see it, and a story, or blog post or forum discussion for that matter, never receives its proper due.

Enter the world of favoriting tweets on Twitter, the primary agent of how I keep up on what’s relevant, timely, and too good not to miss in terms of content. Favoriting, starring, or flagging articles is obviously nothing new, but it’s a must-do if you’re trying to stay abreast on everything important in the PR industry – especially if you have little time to get that juicy nugget of detail, and you’re following 1,000 PR and social media-savvy tweeps. Use it to your advantage! Continue reading

Do you have FOMO?

Sounds like a disease, right? Oh, it is. FOMO is the “fear of missing out,” as the New York Times cleverly reported this past week. The cause: Facebook – and other social networks that can’t notify you enough of what your friends are doing.

The availability and accessibility of content has caused an uproar “socially”; many people think their life is boring when comparing it to other individuals’ posts – whether it be an update, photo, or video of a concert, new baby, etc. I, for one, get rather envious when I see a particular “friend” post updates of his trips to Costa Rica to swim in the hot springs, or the fact that he sold not one but two houses in a couple hours as a part-time realtor on top of his full-time gig. It’s these types of posts that make people nauseated. Continue reading

Social Media Faux Pas: Even Easier Now to Commit Them

It’s a given that involvement in social media demands us to be omnipresent. We need to be available and accessible to our friends and fans in all places at all times in order to respond to those who enter our world and want to get to know us. Developers have become keen on this by introducing scheduling and management tools like HootSuite and Tweetdeck, as well as some other “stand-in” devices. The constant emergence of new tools and updates makes it impossible to keep up, though. Along a learning curve paved with good intentions, we are likely going to commit some unintentional blunders, or social media faux pas. Continue reading

Clique-happy Social Media

Cliques have always had a negative connotation, beginning with what we remember from our high school days. The “power elite” popular kids excluded us from the underage drinking parties on weekends, and even worse, caused us to be the brunt of many bad jokes as we attempted to be initiated into the in-crowd.

If you compare this type of group and the cliques or niche groups one can find in social networks, it’s a night and day difference. You might have thought this post was going to turn into a rant revealing striking similarities between being a popular kid in high school and a similar position on Twitter, but it’s not. Instead, I’d like to point out how cliques are a natural progression in social media in order to weed out the noise rather than those unwanted based on their looks. Continue reading