Next week’s New Communications Forum is shaping up to be the place to be if you’re in PR and have a blog. Or are interested in blogs. Or have ever heard of blogs.
If you’re going to be there and we haven’t already connected, drop me a line.
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
Page 2 of 7
I’m involved in a little Wikipedia war going on here in New York’s 19th Congressional District.
Kind of cool that it’s the News Herald Record of Middletown, NY that broke the story. Not some high-falutin big city paper. The reporter completely understood the idea behind wikis and Wikipedia.
Miss Rouge points out the latest rage among the upper echelons of the blogosphere.. giving advice on how to become… more effective bloggers!
Yippie!
It’s giving me hives as well. Any mention of Covey’s Habits of Highly Obsessive Compulsive Drones gives me ick chills.
Seriously, blogging is about self-expression. Make yourself happy. Don’t follow formulas. Rules were meant to be broken. And there’s not such thing as an ineffective blog.
I saw this one over the weekend and to be honest, I had to hold myself back from writing. I needed a bit of time to let myself lose a bit of the moral outrage.
Donald Rumsfeld is arguing that Al Qaeda is winning the PR war. No arguement from me on that.
This is what got me all pissy:
Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Pentagon chief said today’s weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.
Remember when I got all in a huff over WalMart attributing its problems to bad press and not to its shitty labor practices?
He lamented that vast media attention about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq outweighed that given to the discovery of “Saddam Hussein’s mass graves.”
I’ll spare you all the political rant. Here instead is the PR rant…. Public relations is a tactic. It is not a substitute for reality. More APRs being airlifted into Baghdad is not the solution and won’t win hearts and minds.
If you or your clients aren’t paying attention to the underlying problem – be it widgets that won’t sell or images of tortured innocents in a prison formerly used by the dictator you threw out – PR isn’t going to solve the problem. It might paper over the problem for a bit (“Hey… look over there, not here”) but not forever.
/rant over
I’m with Mike Arrington and Om Malik on this one.. the way to a blogger’s heart is not through ‘sucking up.’
Let’s all say this together – the idea of ‘pitching’ anyone the way they teach it in the big agencies is dead.
My most successful pitches, such as they are, were no more than two sentences long, i.e., ‘Hey there, I’ve got a story here I thought you might be interested in. If you aren’t the right person, sorry, please pass this along to whomever in your publication might be interested…. blah blah blah.’
Sucking up, like the five paragraph long pitch letters my former overlords used to insist that I write, get you nowhere. Getting to the point quickly, and getting the reporter what they need, gets your client coverage and makes you look good.
And isn’t looking good what it’s all about?
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