I hire lots of people who are fresh out of school for my PR team. Below are the job specific things that I look for in new hires. A sense of what news is: PR pros are not yet glorified community managers. We still ‘do’ news and pitching. The latter requires…
The “new tools” of marketing and PR are still “new” even though they’ve been in use for years now. Though best practices and rules of the game still appear far from certain, “new media” is now an established, entrenched industry, with all the hallmarks that come with this distinction. Books…
Writing is really hard. It is one of those things that lots of people claim to be good at but aren’t. Mechanics, style, flow and the inability to express thoughts succinctly are the usual suspects when it comes to crappy prose. Even if you are OK at putting words together,…
If you, like me, follow mainstream media outlets on Twitter then you LOVE how they clog up your stream by broadcasting their own content. While a number of organizations have figured out great uses for Twitter, big media remains seemingly clueless. The content outlets broadcast via tweets does not seem…
I just got Jamel Shabazz’s incredible book of photos, Back in the Days. In a nutshell, it documents hip hop and street culture (mostly in NYC) from 1980-1989. The incredibly varied sense of fashion in hip hop culture during the early days is striking. It was not all homogenous the…
Parents agonize over where to send their kids to school. This is especially true if they are spending $10k plus on the price of admission to a private institution. Some private schools seem to get marketing, some don’t. While education is something most people are apt to spend money on,…
Last week somebody asked me about whether they should invest money in putting a press release out via a newswire service. Newswires are REALLY expensive and the lovely folks who run them make you pay for distribution by the word. This is a pretty archaic way of doing things (and…
This post by Julien Smith on the perils of saying “I love you” inspired today’s post, the first in a new video series called “Shoot that term in the head.” In business there are sorts of fucked up and vague terms that people use as ways to obfuscate, betlittle, exploit,…
I had the pleasure of chatting with Aimee Davison (pictured above) of One Hundred Jobs and Fashion Ambush today. So much of the conversation around social media/new PR/marketing 2.0 takes place between industry “experts” so the idea here was to profile someone from outside the industry who “gets it”. Aimee…
I ate at a ridiculously dope restaurant called Garde Manger last night. It was my second visit and the first for two of my companions. What struck me as I sampled quail and lobster risotto was that the place, while high end and priced as such, had no pretensions. The…