Strive Notes

After an embarrassingly long absence due to family and business circumstances too numerous to mention, we finally have the return of the PR Top 5.  Here’s what I’ve been loving this week!

1. When PR 2.0’s Brian Solis talks, people listen. And when he talks about news release embargoes (always favourite link bait subject), people comment and retweet.  In this longish post, he explains the mechanics of an embargo and references a lot of current thinking.  He says, “Embargoes are powerful and effective for all parties when coordinated properly and centered on information that is indeed newsworthy.”  I can’t agree.  I think issuing news under embargo is risky at best; a disaster waiting to happen at worse.

2. Matthew Stibbe names and shames those PR firms that continue to send him irrelevant news releases.  He lists 14 releases by headline along with the agencies that sent them.  It seems that 5W Public Relations likes Matthew a lot with several mentions on the list.  The post has no comments from the offending agencies however.  That’s not too surprising I guess. If they don’t read before sending, they probably aren’t listening anyway. I wonder if their clients will notice?

3. In Words of a Broken Mirror, Alina Popescu gives us her take on how to resource PR when budgets are tight. She looks at outsourcing, getting exisiting staff to look after PR and hiring an expert in-house as various options. One she’s missed out is getting an expert to coach, train and mentor existing staff members.  I’ve been spending a significant amount of time doing this lately.

4.  One objection to social media engagement that I hear often is about opening the door to public criticism.  You can understand that people get jumpy about negative feedback.  Here Mitch Joel offers six ways to consider how to handle it.

5.  Steve Rubel has posted some interesting stats on how PR people feel about news releases, overall is seems they are falling from favour.  He says, “Still press releases have their place – especially in financial situations. Also let’s not overlook the potential SEO value too.”  Agreed.  They were only ever supposed to be a story summary and door opener to help gain the interest of a journalist.  A well written news release still does the job nicely.

Filed under: Social Media, public relations