In my very first communications class, I was taught the first step of the writing process was to know your audience. Everyone knows that understanding your audience is important, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to revisit the communication basics by celebrating the success of our fellow PR professionals.
The success of a current campaign by the American Mustache Institute, H&R Block and Millions from One is rooted in their deep understanding of their audience. Inspired by a 2010 white paper by tax professor John Yeutter, AMI launched a humorous campaign called the “Million Mustache March.” The campaign revolves around mobilizing mustache aficionados to pressure Congress to pass the STACHE Act (Stimulus To Allow Critical Hair Expenses), a $250 tax deduction for Americans with mustaches, as they make America significantly more attractive. Continue reading →
Last week Old Spice made some funny videos. Maybe you’ve heard about it?
Of course you have.
Now it is apparently time for you to learn from it, as you undoubtedly hope to be the next Old Spice-like thing that all the kids are talking about on the internets. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say it is very unlikely that Old Spice’s success can be replicated by you, or anyone. And I’m not saying that because I think Old Spice’s campaign was some perfect storm that wasn’t meant to take off like it did; it was clearly a well-engineered piece of awesome. And I’m not saying that we’ll never see a wildly popular campaign like this ever again; we will. But it won’t be anything like the Old Spice campaign because we’ve already seen that. Continue reading →
To maintain our social media accounts, and help our clients do the same, it seems that we, myself included, have become advocates of repurposing content. Taking a press releases and extracting an e-blast from it. Sending post-event photos to print media and uploading them to Facebook. Putting links to YouTube in our press releases and putting the videos on our website.
Sure, it all makes sense. Social media takes time and time is money. So why not stretch your content when and where you can? It ensures continuity of messaging, keeps all of your communication platforms looking fresh and increases touchpoints with your target audience. But at what point does repurposing become synonymous with diluting? Can you post a new spin <gosh I hate that word> on the same news too many times? Continue reading →
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. Continue reading →
In recent months I’ve noticed an uptick in what I consider recycled advertisements – those television spots that were new within the past year or two, but disappeared for quite some time. After an absence, these ads are back. While I can understand that ad budgets have shrunk within the past year, I think companies are overlooking the message that this strategy is sending to consumers. Continue reading →
Legos were a fundamental part of my childhood and I am sure many others’ as well. That said, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I found LegoClick intriguing. While it is, at its core, a social network, Lego has taken great strides to integrate its effort into other SM tools.
This new community comes complete with its own hashtag (#Legoclick) and YouTube videos, encourages interaction through Flickr and showcases user photos of some impressive Lego creations. The question is, is this enough to keep adults engaged?
I raise the question of adults, because LegoClick is intended to be a community of inventors. Mashable reports it is a community to share visions about new products and toys. So, are Legos destined to become the new water cooler buzz and lunch hour stress buster? Continue reading →
To say the results of the new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation floored me would be an understatement. Learning that young people across the nation are spending an average of about 7.5 hours a day with entertainment media was simply jarring. As if spending more than 53 hours each week with entertainment media weren’t bad enough, the study found that these youth have mastered an art form — ‘media multitasking.’ By using more than one entertainment medium at a time, they are able to cram 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those same 7.5 hrs.
While my own youth may have fallen well before the advent of social media, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t adapt latter in life. Continue reading →
Before I get chased out of my profession by my superiors, I want to make a few things very clear:
- I have great respect and admiration for the arsenal of long-standing media relationships PR veterans have built and maintained.
- I willingly admit there is much that I can learn from my superiors’ successes (and, admittedly, from their struggles as well.)
Now that we’ve laid some ground-work. . .or covered my backside, whichever you find more appropriate. . .let’s get to the reason for making myself perfectly clear (other than abiding by the Co-Communications mantra, ‘Make Yourself Perfectly Clear.’) If veterans of the PR industry don’t evolve, can they survive? Or will they die-off like the newspapers we sorely miss?
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The following takes place via e-mail. What you are about to see is a dramatic reenactment of a group of caffeine-depraved flacks talking about the MTV Video Music Awards.
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…..a chance to start the day off right.
