Over the last month or so I’ve posted a few technical stories over here – Email tracking and Tweet Dilution (as well as an April fool’s piece and the chance to play devil’s advocate). Today we’ll have a bit more fun with the more websites and services that have popped up around and support our favorite social media sites (or feed our habits)
• FriendOrFollow.com – Remember that person who worked for Widget, Inc. in Chicago that you followed months ago but can’t recall her username to save your life. FriendOrFollow.com to the rescue. The service allows you to download your friend, follower and fan lists as CSV (Comma Separated Value – readable by Excel and other, similar programs) including their username, location, bio, etc. making it easily searchable. Throwing a party – find all your area fans at once (except those that use coordinates as their location) with a simple resort of the column. Concerned about your account being suspended, use ForF to keep a backup of all your Twitter people. Continue reading →
I had the distinct pleasure of playing one of my favorite roles recently — Devil’s Advocate — to a post written by our own Christina and Marie (which can be found here). The best way to convey my message was with a brief(ish) letter….
As you both know I hate to deliver bad news, but it’s finally time. There is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or Team Unicorn that will be joining you in your meetings.
The points you mention in your post are lovely and, of course, completely workable. And I’m sitting in a chair made of Skittles. Continue reading →
A few days ago a minor firestorm brewed over the importance of your (whether that’s you, your brand, your company, etc.) follower count over at Kate’s post. Everyone providing commentary had valuable input (in my opinion) and certainly each has a different goal, or at the very least different way of approaching the issue. One even found great pleasure at the hypothetical situation that an account would have more followers outside its target audience than inside of it because then at least there’d be confirmation you (or the account) was in-fact doing something right.
All of these conversations centered on how many followers the account itself has. There is another factor to consider in this formula to determine reach — How many people are your followers following? Yes, I’m serious. We’re talking TweetDilution people. Continue reading →
Nota Bene: Please note the date on which this post was originally posted and enjoy it with appropriate grains of salt.
As many of you know, one of our own, the enviable Ms. Marie V-Bhas gotten knocked up is with child – her first. This upcoming addition to our family brings the total number of grand-PRBCers (as in grandchildren, not as in “really cool” though that likely applies as well) to some number we can’t count without taking off our shoes (damnit Jim, we’re not rocket scientists, we’re flacks!). You can find a full list here.
As we do with all things, we’ve blown this completely out of proportion and purchased a day care center in midtown to be headed up by CT Michaels, a longtime lover of the minor people, and have been coaxing Ms. V-B into bestowing an appropriately odd name upon the child. Continue reading →
Following a comment left on Keith’s post from last week regarding email analytics I received a number of questions (public and private) regarding the simple use of the tools already available to us to track email opens (and forwards, number of views, etc.) this seemed like an ideal time to introduce a new (and hopefully semi-regular feature) on the nitty-gritty of using technology to your business advantage.
You may be asking yourself, “Why should I care? I’m a flack, erm PR Pro – let the techies handle that stuff (or we don’t care about analytics on our emails).”
Perhaps true. But if you’re in a small agency you may not have techs around to really handle this or they never thought to apply analytics to emails because they simply don’t know our business and don’t know what questions to ask. Continue reading →
As previously mentioned the PRBC group emails quite a bit throughout the day on a variety of topics. Frequently they actually involve the blog – does a proposed post create a conflict of interest, upcoming events, discussing substantive PR issues for posts, etc. And sometimes not so much.
Anyone who has to work as part of a team or committee, whether that’s an internal team or a team composed of a client, their internal PR person, the outside agency and frequently others (so probably all of us), has had to deal with various agendas and personalities at the table. Each with their own goals, some necessary, others merely desirable. Continue reading →
For those of you looking for some fun reading, or scrambling to catchup with this week’s fantastic PRBC posts — this week’s top articles (by pageview), in no particular order….
As many of you know members of the PRBC group presented today at Ragan’s Social Media panel. Below we share some of our thoughts on SM. The names in parenthesis indicate who brought up the point. Hyperlinked to their twitter account on the first use.
Diving Into Social Media
Before any company, agency, or professional decides to become involved in social media, there will no doubt be some basic questions that they want answered, or some background information that they would appreciate hearing. The first group of points provide some helpful hints for diving into social media, whether you’re interested in using it for clients or becoming the resident thought-leader for your company. Continue reading →
For 90% of us, writing is the bedrock of our business. Having a good vocabulary, being able to structure a sentence properly and persuasively, and adding that special je ne sais quoito a piece we’re working on is invaluable. It’s not about using big words—it’s about using the right word. Some of the most evocative pieces of literature use very few “big words.” Orwell’s 1984 and Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass instantly come to mind. Continue reading →
Over the last month or so I’ve posted a few technical stories over here – Email tracking and Tweet Dilution (as well as an April fool’s piece and the chance to play devil’s advocate). Today we’ll have a bit more fun with the more websites and services that have popped up around and support our favorite social media sites (or feed our habits)
