Fuck the Social Media Release. It is the PR equivalent of a smoking hot girl who is ridiculously high maintenance, empties your wallet and does not put out when it's time to get down. Here are four reasons to hate SMR's: SMR's are a way for large companies to take…
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There's a million and one blog posts from flaks and journos on how to pitch. Maybe they're worth your time. The "how to" guides of pitching sound the same most of the time though. People tell you that you're supposed to research the reporter, usually lead with an email, make…
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North Korea uses the most over the top official rhetoric of any country on Earth. In fact the language is so routinely bizarre that sometimes you wonder if the place is actually on Mars. Every year at this time the North Korean government issues a collection of crazy statements related…
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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…
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I just grabbed Seth Godin's All Marketers are Liars. True to form, it's bomb ass. The book details how marketing is really about telling stories - a premise you've definitely heard if you've been near a business in the last 5 to 5000 years. So, if telling a story is…
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Length matters. I say this partly because, in the last few days, I've come across several items on the amount of words needed to convey news. Two in particular spurred on some thoughts: This post, that touched on whether the 140 character world might eventually kill traditional news media. A…
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PR is a business in crisis. There are a variety of reasons for this but the Three S's are largely responsible. These are spin, spamming and story pitches with no news value. As Brian Solis has eloquently stated, "PR does not stand for press release". I agree with his contention…
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